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

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texts that <strong>in</strong>clude references to people, places, and th<strong>in</strong>gs. While person names are marked up <strong>in</strong> the
XML text of the Old Bailey Onl<strong>in</strong>e, Bradley and Short remarked that there was no effort “to structure
the names <strong>in</strong>to persons themselves.” This is <strong>in</strong> direct contrast to their relational approach with the
PASE, PBEW, and CCEd:
Our three projects, on the other hand, are explicitly prosopographical by nature, and the
identification of persons is the central task of the researchers, as it must be <strong>in</strong> any
prosopography. They must have a way to separate the people with the same recorded name <strong>in</strong>to
separate categories, and to group together references to a s<strong>in</strong>gle person regardless of the
spell<strong>in</strong>g of his/her name. … It is exactly because prosopographical projects are <strong>in</strong>volved <strong>in</strong> the
creation of a model of their material that is perhaps not explicitly provided <strong>in</strong> the texts they
work with that a purely textual approach is <strong>in</strong> the end not sufficient <strong>in</strong> and of itself. Instead, it is
exactly this k<strong>in</strong>d of structur<strong>in</strong>g which makes our projects particularly suitable for the relational
database model (Bradley and Short 2005).
In addition, the databases for all three of these projects conta<strong>in</strong> not only “structured data <strong>in</strong> the form of
factoids” but also structures that are spread over several tables and represent other important objects <strong>in</strong>
the database <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g “persons, geographic locations, and possessions.”
Bradley and Short also addressed a po<strong>in</strong>t raised earlier by Mathisen regard<strong>in</strong>g the limitations of
historical databases and the <strong>in</strong>terpretation and categorization of data. As Mathisen ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>ed, they
argued that all work with prosopographical sources, whether writ<strong>in</strong>g an article or creat<strong>in</strong>g a database
<strong>in</strong>volved a fair amount of scholarly <strong>in</strong>terpretation and categorization. Rather than attempt<strong>in</strong>g to create
an “appropriate” model of their sources, Bradley and Short argued they were try<strong>in</strong>g to create a model
of how prosopographers work with those sources:
For, of course, our database is not designed to model the texts upon which prosopography is
based with all their subtle and ambiguous mean<strong>in</strong>gs. The database, <strong>in</strong>stead, models the task of
the prosopographer <strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong>terpret<strong>in</strong>g them i.e. it is not a model of an historical text, but a model
of prosopography itself (Bradley and Short 2005).
The importance of model<strong>in</strong>g how scholars with<strong>in</strong> a discipl<strong>in</strong>e conduct their work and how they work
with their sources are important components <strong>in</strong> the design not just of historical databases but also <strong>in</strong>
larger digital <strong>in</strong>frastructures that will need to support multidiscipl<strong>in</strong>ary work.
Mathisen has described the approach of the PBW as a comb<strong>in</strong>ation of a “multi-file relational model”
with a “decentralized biography model” (Mathisen 2007) or where <strong>in</strong>stead of hav<strong>in</strong>g an <strong>in</strong>dividual
record with dedicated fields created for each <strong>in</strong>dividual, each person is <strong>in</strong>stead assigned a unique ID
key that is then associated with the <strong>in</strong>formation bites or “factoids” as described above <strong>in</strong> various other
databases. “Biographies” are thus created for <strong>in</strong>dividuals by assembl<strong>in</strong>g all the relevant factoids for an
<strong>in</strong>dividual. Mathisen offered a few caveats <strong>in</strong> terms of the methodology chosen for the PBW, namely,
that the complexity of the data structure would make it hard for anyone without expert computer skills
to implement such a solution and that the “multiplicity of sub-databases and lack of core biographies”
would make it difficult to export this material or <strong>in</strong>tegrate it with another PDB without specialized
programm<strong>in</strong>g (Mathisen 2007). He also feared that the lack of “base-level” person entries might mean
that important <strong>in</strong>formation for <strong>in</strong>dividuals could be omitted when different factoids were comb<strong>in</strong>ed and
could also make it difficult to determ<strong>in</strong>e when occurrences of the same name represent the same or
different <strong>in</strong>dividuals. Despite this assertion, Bradley and Short proposed that by not provid<strong>in</strong>g their
users with an “easy-to-read” f<strong>in</strong>al article about each <strong>in</strong>dividual and <strong>in</strong>stead present<strong>in</strong>g a collection of