Introduction

We are currently in the research and architecture phase. The goal is to build a simple prototype that informs the development of production-scale services.

For more details, see the roadmap, architecture notes, and implementation notes pages. We also have some sparse notes from meetings. The user stories provide quick application requirements.

Project News

September 2009: Laurie Pearce and Stephanie Langin-Hooper attended the CDLI meeting at UCLA. One session was devoted to the development of a CDLI seal/seal-impression database. This is being developed by Christina Tsouparopolou (Berlin) and is intended to catalogue seals and seal-impressions from all periods of usage in Mesopotamia. Pearce and Langin-Hooper presented the existing HBTIN seal-impression database. The points they highlighted included: problems in transformation of legacy databases; attribution of scholars' published descriptions of seal iconography; database design and how it influences and shapes the query and data-recovery process.

August 2009: Ronald Wallenfels, Laurie Pearce, Jay Crisostomo and Stephanie Langin-Hooper completed the editing of the seal(-impression) database created for HBTIN. In Jan. 2009, Steve Tinney transformed Wallenfels' legacy Nota Bene files used to produce Wallenfels' 1994 catalogue raisonee, "Uruk: Hellenistic Seal Impressions" (AUWE 19. Mainz: Phillip von Zabern). The iconographic data and prosopographic notices associated with the seal-impressions are central to the creation of a full data set and underscore that the "complete object" (text and image) must be included in any artifact analysis. These data strengthen the BPS tool-set and further define the potential of the prosopography tools. Pearce and Langin-Hooper will attend a September CDLI conference in order to participate in the discussion and development of the CDLI seal catalogue.

July 9, 2009: Stephanie Langin-Hooper and Laurie Pearce present a paper (CDL, HBTIN & BPS: The Very Model of a Major Modern Prosopography) at the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Paris. The paper explains the interconnections between CDL, HBTIN and BPS and presents a mock-up of how the prosopography tool will work. Selected slides from the Powerpoint presentation are here.

April 23, 2009: We presented our project to the UC Berkeley HART Initiative symposium. The poster outlining our project and its development can be seen here. The HART Initiative supported our work from January-August 2009.

Mar 10, 2009: An article about the project has just been published in Berkeley's iNews: Using Natural Language Processing and Social Network Analysis to study ancient Babylonian society

Project Vision

• Build a generalized SNA reasoner
• Build graphical visualization tools for families, social networks, that support what-if and similar workflows.
• Communities build recognizers for names, activities, etc. and rulebases for various languages, corpora

Near term plan

• Understand constrained domain. (mostly done, but ongoing)
• Compile summary results of needs assessment (done Read the results)
• Investigate example documents (done)
• Design generalized architecture (done)
• Build team (done)
• Develop core pieces, one at a time (In process)
• User-centered-design for presentation, etc.
• Lemmatizer in progress at UPenn
• Seals DB cleaned up, transferred by Jay and Stephanie (done)
• Names DB being cleaned up by Laurie (name authority DB done)
• Patrick, Pierre working on architecture model

Project Principles

• Decomposition, stepwise development, regular customer review
• TEI-for-BPS (XML) is input and output
• Design and deploy as SOA
• Text preprocessing is custom for each corpus, network reasoning and presentation are reusable
• World knowledge will improve reasoning
• Name orthographies, age ranges, business domains, etc.

Example markup

We have a page that discusses an example of what the markup should look like for a sample tablet. You can also view the actual XML file. Our XML vocabulary uses a subset of TEI markup; we parsed and marked up the example by hand. For an easier to interpret format, see the XML processed through XSLT back into HTML, indicating the parsing we did. It highlights the names, and uses brackets to delimit the name extents. The individual's name is in blue, and patronyms are in purple. Where there are clan names, they are in red.

Team Members

Patrick Schmitz, Semantic Services Architect, IST/Data Services, U.C. Berkeley (2008- )

Dr. Laurie Pearce, Near Eastern Studies, U.C. Berkeley (2008- )

Prof. Niek Veldhuis, Near Eastern Studies, U.C. Berkeley (2008- )

Prof. Steve Tinney, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, U. Penn (2008- )

C. Jay Crisostomo, Near Eastern Studies, U.C. Berkeley (2008- )

Stephanie Langin-Hoooper, Near Eastern Studies, U.C. Berkeley (2008- )

Pierre Tchetgen, School of Information, U.C. Berkeley (2008-2009)

Project Affiliate

Dr. Ronald Wallenfels, NYU and Monmouth (NJ) University (2008- )

Background Research, Related Projects

CDL

The Cuneiform Digital Library (CDL) at University of Pennsylvania is a collaborative network of projects centered around the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. They provide a global registry for cuneiform documents (the CDLI catalog), tools for corpus-development (the ATF specification and related software and web-services), educational pages (the CDLI wiki) and a free hosting service to support the development of special-interest projects. We've talked quite a bit with Steve Tinney, and are leveraging other CDL resources as well.

PASE

The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE) is a database which aims to cover all of the recorded inhabitants of England from the late sixth to the end of the eleventh century. It is based on a systematic examination of the available written sources for the period, including chronicles, saints’ Lives, charters, libri vitae, inscriptions, and coins.

Prosopographia Ptolemaica

According to this project's website, "The Prosopographia Ptolemaica started as a list of all inhabitants of Egypt between 300 and 30 B.C., from Greek, Egyptian and Latin sources, both authors and documents. It is now being extended to the Roman and Byzantine periods. The Prosopographia Ptolemaic has been integrated in the papyrological framework of Trismegistos. It is also set up in close collaboration with the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis and the Duke Database of Documentary Papyri."

Prosopography of the Byzantine World

Oxford Prosopographical Research Unit

An international group of scholars dedicated to the study and promotion, and, where necessary, development, of the disciplines and methods of prosopography. A recent publication, Prosopography Approaches and Applications: A Handbook, is a manual aimed at beginners and experts, covering the Ancient World, the Middle Ages, including Islam, and the Modern period. A Tutorial is also available at http://prosopography.modhist.ox.ac.uk/

Network for Intercultural Onomastics

NIO's aim is to further research in intercultural onomastics in a systematic way, to provide guidelines for the classification of contact (cross-culturally equivalent) names, and to put people working in the field in contact with one another. It was also suggested that the society should deal systematically with sociological and psychological explanations for intercultural naming practices.