Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic as Linked Open Data
John Bradley (KCL)
Digital Classicist London seminar 2020
Friday June 26th at 17:30, online from the Institute of Classical Studies.
Livecast at Digital Classicist London YouTube channel.
The Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic (DPRR) was a three year AHRC project. It created a database of all known members of the Roman Republic’s elite by connecting up information from previous prosopographical projects such as Broughton’s fundamental Magistrates of the Roman Republic, Rüpke’s inventory of Roman priests in the Fasti Sacerdotum, information about family relations from Zmeskal’s Adfinitas, Nicolet’s work on the equestrian order, and Pina Polo’s work on defeated candidates, along with several others. DPRR assembles and aligns this diverse information to present Republic individuals’ careers, offices, personal status, life dates and family relationships.
The website at http://romanrepublic.ac.uk provides public access to the product of this research and contains a sophisticated way to explore DPRR’s data. It is readily accessible to classical scholars, and the Principal Investigator for the project, Prof Henrik Mouritsen, spoke about DPRR from a classicist’s perspective last year. In this seminar we intend to present an alternative Digital Humanities Linked open Data (LoD) perspective by looking closely at DPRR’s RDF (Resource Description Framework) Server at http://romanrepublic.ac.uk/rdf. Pretty well all of DPRR’s essential research effort resulted in high structured data. What, then, is the nature of this material as RDF? RDF has been described by one of its inventors–Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the WWW)–as a possible foundation for Linked Open Data, but the nature of RDF’s expression, at first glance at least, will seem to many to be far too impoverished to be suitable for historical materials. In what ways was RDF well, and less well, suited to the DPRR project? Finally, the purpose of Linked Open Data is to allow anyone worldwide to discover strikingly new connections within materials. In the seminar we will explore how DPRR can, and indeed already has, allowed this to happen.
ALL WELCOME