Abstract
Developing prosopographies or onomastic lists in a non-digital environment used to be a painstaking and time-consuming exercise, involving manual labour by teams of researchers, often taking decades. For some scholarly disciplines from the ancient world this is still true, especially those studying non-alphabetical writing systems that lack a uniform transcription system, e.g. Demotic. But for many others, such as Greek and Latin, digital full text corpora in Unicode are now available, often even freely accessible. In this paper we illustrate, on the basis of Trismegistos, how data collection through Named Entity Recognition and visualization through Social Network Analysis have huge potential to speed up the creation of onomastic lists and the development of prosopographies.
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References
Similar methods are applied in e.g. Klein, L.F.: The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemmings. American Literature 85(4), 661–688 (2013)
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Our approach leans toward the methods applied by Rossi et al. to a large database of French notarial acts from the 13th-18th centuries: Rossi, F., Villa-Vialaneix, N., Hautefeullie, F.: Exploration of a Large Database of French Notarial Acts with Social Network Methods. Digital Medievalist 9 (2013) http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/9/villavialaneix/
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Broux, Y., Depauw, M. (2015). Developing Onomastic Gazetteers and Prosopographies for the Ancient World Through Named Entity Recognition and Graph Visualization: Some Examples from Trismegistos People. In: Aiello, L., McFarland, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8852. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7_38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7_38
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