Texts into Databases: The Evolving Field of New-style Prosopography

Unknown But Not Unknowable: The Network of Identified and Unidentified Hands in the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript

“…Identity, Bradley and Short (2005) suggest, has to be something that scholars can argue about, that is to say, if we may borrow an elementary school dictum, prosopographers must show their work and their sources so that others may weigh their assertions.…”

“…Aer outlining current scholarship about the named hands in the manuscript, from which many of the research cues are taken, the article outlines how entering the poems and their metadata into a graph database lets the unidentified contributors' patterns of behaviour in the manuscript itself be traced. is paper engages with the debates about prosopographic best practice, connecting the open and "visible record" called for by Michele Pasin and John Bradley (2015) to the larger imperative to develop more open models of scholarly publishing (Bradley & Short, 2005;Verboven, Carlier, & Dumolyn, 2007). e article responds to that call as we work to develop new knowledge about the unnamed contributors to the Devonshire Manuscript.…”

Nanopublication beyond the sciences: the PeriodO period gazetteer

“…First of all, even Mink did not argue that there were no facts in history, only that the significant conclusions drawn by historians do not typically take the form of factual statements. There are plenty of equivalents in history and the humanities to the databases of curated factual statements that exists in the sciences: prosopographical databases (Bradley & Short, 2005), digital historical gazetteers (Elliott & Gillies, 2011), not to mention the catalogs and indexes of bibliographical data that make humanities scholarship possible (Buckland, 2006). Some of these facts may be vague or uncertain, but as Kuhn et al (2013) observe, even knowledge that cannot be completely formally represented, including vague or uncertain scientific findings, can benefit from the nanopublication approach.…”

Research note: The founders and survivors project

“…Thus by maintaining the source's integrity, while opening up the source to structured analysis, we effectively address many of the important parts of the 'life-cycle of historical information' (Boonstra, Breure, & Doorn, 2004). This model has been advocated and trialled by a number of scholars (Spaeth, 2004;Bradley, 2005;Bradley & Short, 2005), and the award-winning website, Old Bailey Online, implemented such a system. Indeed, the Old Bailey's publicly available statistical functions are based upon an XML-to-RDBMS system.…”