Late antique prosopography and Socrates Scholasticus’ Ecclesiastical history
William Garrood (KCL)
Digital Classicist London seminar 2020
Friday June 12th at 17:30, online from the Institute of Classical Studies.
Livecast at Digital Classicist London YouTube channel.
This paper looks at digital techniques in relation to proposography and its practical application to late antique texts. It particularly explores the possibilities for network analysis in this context.
Prosopography, the structuring of biographical data, has rapidly evolved over the last few decades with the growing pervasiveness of computing technology and its application to historical discipines. For prosopography, a subject well suited to digital scholarship, this has meant profound changes in both the level of information that can be included, though in this it is following a wider trend in the discipline, and a change in how we collate, present and locate the information. The pace of this takeup is uneven, but in some areas, new style ‘factoid’ prosopographies like the Prosopography of the Byzantine World (PBW) offer the potential for new forms of analysis and far easier sorting of source data.
This paper examines this evolution and builds on the approach taken by the recent digital prosopographies, drawing on my own work compiling a digital prosopography of Socrates Scholasticus’ Ecclesiastical History. It explores the implications of the decisions taken in modern prosopographies and suggests that it would be helpful to enable more extensive implication within and aggregation of the data. It also explores the possibility for greater depth and structuring of relationship and location information. Decisions around all these factors have implications for what analysis is possible, and I outline those in particular in terms of the network analysis possible in this area.
Scorates’ text has its own peculiarities and this paper highlights some of those. I outline as a case study what this kind of analysis shows about the text’s own preoccuptions and make a relationship-led case for the centrality of the Emperor in Socrates’ history.
ALL WELCOME