Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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Bradley and Short (2005) have offered some <strong>in</strong>sights <strong>in</strong>to the creation of highly structured databases
such as the PBW from sources used <strong>in</strong> the study of prosopography. 542 As illustrated above, the data <strong>in</strong>
the PBW are drawn from a large number of primary sources, and while Bradley and Short
acknowledge that many traditional humanities comput<strong>in</strong>g projects might have sought to first create
digital editions of these primary sources, they believed that the prosopographical nature of their project
required a different solution:
This is because a digital prosopographical project does not aim to produce a textual edition. If it
is to be true to its name, it must create <strong>in</strong>stead, a new secondary source. Like a classic
prosopography such as the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire…a digital
prosopography must act as a k<strong>in</strong>d of visible record of the analysis of the sources produced by
the scholars as they try to sort out who’s who from a close analysis of the extant source
materials (Bradley and Short 2005).
In traditional pr<strong>in</strong>ted prosopographies, this activity typically results <strong>in</strong> a biographical article that
summarizes what can be concluded about the life of an <strong>in</strong>dividual from different sources and
<strong>in</strong>terpretative arguments from a scholar to support his or her conclusions. A dist<strong>in</strong>guish<strong>in</strong>g feature of
the PBW, then, as a “new-style” digital prosopography is that its f<strong>in</strong>al publication is as a “highly
structured database” not as a series of articles.
As Bradley and Short expla<strong>in</strong> and as seen above, all evidence data with<strong>in</strong> the PBW have been recorded
as a series of factoids, or assertions made by a member of the project that a “source ‘S’ at location ‘L’
states someth<strong>in</strong>g (‘F’) about Person ‘P’” (Bradley and Short 2005). Accord<strong>in</strong>g to Bradley and Short, a
factoid is not a def<strong>in</strong>itive statement of fact about a person, and a collection of factoids should not be
considered as a scholarly overview of a person. Instead, factoids simply record assertions “made by a
source at a particular spot about a person.” S<strong>in</strong>ce factoids may contradict each other (e.g., make
different assertions about an <strong>in</strong>dividual’s ethnicity), all factoids about a person are <strong>in</strong>cluded <strong>in</strong> the
database. The database also <strong>in</strong>cludes a place where prosopographers can record their own assertions
about why they have <strong>in</strong>terpreted a text <strong>in</strong> a certa<strong>in</strong> way. This methodology makes it easier to display
the uncerta<strong>in</strong>ty <strong>in</strong>herent <strong>in</strong> determ<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g “facts” about an <strong>in</strong>dividual from complicated primary sources
and also illustrates that factoids are also “acts of <strong>in</strong>terpretation by the researcher that gathers them.”
“The ironic flavour of the name ‘Factoid’ is not accidental,” Bradley and Short submitted, “It reflects
the historian’s worry when a t<strong>in</strong>y extract is taken out of the context of a larger text and the historical
period <strong>in</strong> which it was written and presented as a ‘fact’”(Bradley and Short 2005). Nonetheless, one
difficulty with the factoid approach was how to establish what types of factoids should be collected,
and historical events proved to be the most challeng<strong>in</strong>g k<strong>in</strong>d of data to transform <strong>in</strong>to factoids. 543
S<strong>in</strong>ce factoids l<strong>in</strong>k different k<strong>in</strong>ds of structured <strong>in</strong>formation and there were thousands of factoids
(60,000 or so, accord<strong>in</strong>g to the website), a relational model was chosen to help users make sense of all
of the data. The relational model also offers many new facets for access as most pr<strong>in</strong>ted
prosopographies only offer two to three <strong>in</strong>dexes to articles they conta<strong>in</strong>. Bradley and Short contrast
their process of creat<strong>in</strong>g a database with the “text-oriented modell<strong>in</strong>g” of projects such as the Old
Bailey Onl<strong>in</strong>e. 544 The Old Bailey Onl<strong>in</strong>e provides access to a searchable onl<strong>in</strong>e edition of the historical
pr<strong>in</strong>ted proceed<strong>in</strong>gs of the Old Bailey, and like most prosopographical projects is based on narrative
542 This article also offers some details on the creation of two related database projects, the “Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE)”
(http://www.pase.ac.uk/pase/apps/<strong>in</strong>dex.jsp) and the “Clergy of the Church of England Database” (CCEd)
(http://www.theclergydatabase.org.uk/<strong>in</strong>dex.html).
543 The computational model<strong>in</strong>g of historical events can be very complicated and was also described by Robertson (2009) <strong>in</strong> his discussion of HEML.
544 http://www.oldbaileyonl<strong>in</strong>e.org/