Digital Prosopography for Renaissance Musicians: Discovery of Social and Professional Networks

FAIN: HD-51636-13

Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD 21218-2608)
Susan Forscher Weiss (Project Director: October 2012 to May 2016)
Ichiro Fujinaga (Co Project Director: October 2012 to May 2016)

The continued development of a prosopographical database tracing the social and professional networks of Renaissance musicians, using automated methods to identify individuals and biographical information within relevant sources and to establish relationships between them.

As part of Web 2.0 (Semantic Web), there is a new technology called FOAF (Friend of a Friend), describing relationships between people. We will investigate the applicability of FOAF for describing relationships between musicians of the past, thereby establishing a new biographical tool. Musicians have complex relationships,particularly those between teachers and students and those within ensembles of various sizes. Visual artists may have similar teacher-student relationships, but typically do not create their work together. Dancers may perform together, but they are usually taught in groups. Similarly, athletes may compete in groups, but they do not usually perform in public with their coaches. For this project we will focus specifically on relationships among Renaissance musicians and how to extract the biographical and relational data automatically from existing documents using natural language processing technology, creating a model applicable to other time periods and disciplines.

Associated Products

Human History Project: Digital Prosopography of Renaissance Musicians (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Human History Project: Digital Prosopography of Renaissance Musicians
Abstract: The Human History Project is a large, long-term enterprise, which aims to build a distributed international database of documented human history using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and Linked Open Data (LOD) to model historical data. Exploiting the ever-increasing availability of historical documents and recent improvements in optical character recognition (OCR), this project aims to create, automatically, an economically feasible digital prosopographical database, which will include series of events (relationships between named entities). Even with the current state-of-the-art OCR and NLP technologies, however, there are still some errors for which we plan to deploy crowd- or expert-sourcing techniques for corrections. For this we are developing a web application to correct errors. The results are stored in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) quad format (i.e., with named graph), which then can be searched via SPARQL query language. In a pilot NEH-funded project entitled “Digital Prosopography of Renaissance Musicians,” we are creating a framework that can answer questions not easily answered by Google-like searches or traditional means. Some have referred to it as a “Facebook of the Past.” We conducted some initial experiments with promising results. It is hoped that as more historical documents are digitized and as the NLP technologies improve, a wealth of historical information, which was available but difficult to extract, can be more easily searched and retrieved. Our work will have implications for the growing sub-discipline of prosopography.
Author: Susan Forscher Weiss and Ichiro Fujinaga
Date: 08/12/2106
Location: Digital Libraries for Musicology Workshop New York City, NY, USA 12 August 2016
Primary URL: https://www.mcgill.ca/channels/event/ichiro-fujinaga-–-human-history-project-dh-work-progress-series-232511
Primary URL Description: Main site for the Human History Project
Secondary URL: https://www.mcgill.ca/channels/category/tags/prosopography
Secondary URL Description: Specific cite for prosopography.

---