Berkeley Prosopography Services: Building Research Communities and Restoring Ancient Communities through Digital Tools

FAIN: HD-51041-10

University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)
Niek C. Veldhuis (Project Director: October 2009 to August 2013)

Development of the Berkeley Prosopography Service (BPS), an open source digital toolkit that extracts prosopographic data from TEI encoded text and generates interactive visual representations of social networks.

Berkeley Prosopography Service (BPS) is an innovative open-source digital tool and service that automatically extracts prosopographic data from TEI-encoded text and generates visualizations of the dynamic social networks contained in the text corpora. Filters allow researchers to vary search parameters to consider alternative or hypothetical scenarios such as the impact of individuals and conditions on social and economic relationships. BPS provides users with individual workspaces for research, assessment and probabilistic modelling, while corpus administrators maintain data integrity. During the grant period, BPS, the first independent tool and service to be incorporated into the international Cuneiform Digital Library consortium, will undergo beta-testing of additional text corpora to confirm the reliability and generalizability of its tools for widespread use in the broad community of prosopographers.

Associated Products