Humanist-centric tools for big data: berkeley prosopography services

Abstract

In this paper, we describe Berkeley Prosopography Services (BPS), a new set of tools for prosopography - the identification of individuals and study of their interactions - in support of humanities research. Prosopography is an example of "big data" in the humanities, characterized not by the size of the datasets, but by the way that computational and data-driven methods can transform scholarly workflows. BPS is based upon re-usable infrastructure, supporting generalized web services for corpus management, social network analysis, and visualization. The BPS disambiguation model is a formal implementation of the traditional heuristics used by humanists, and supports plug-in rules for adaptation to a wide range of domain corpora. A workspace model supports exploratory research and collaboration. We contrast the BPS model of configurable heuristic rules to other approaches for automated text analysis, and explain how our model facilitates interpretation by humanist researchers. We describe the significance of the BPS assertion model in which researchers assert conclusions or possibilities, allowing them to override automated inference, to explore ideas in what-if scenarios, and to formally publish and subscribe-to asserted annotations among colleagues, and/or with students. We present an initial evaluation of researchers' experience using the tools to study corpora of cuneiform tablets, and describe plans to expand the application of the tools to a broader range of corpora.