About

SPEAR: Syriac Persons, Events, and Relations is a prosopographical database providing information about persons and their relationships within the context of historical events. It contains TEI encoded scholarly interpretations of prosopographical data appearing in Syriac texts.

What follows is a brief introduction to the data model of SPEAR. For a detailed introduction, see the Encoding Manual/TEI Customization on the documentaiton page and Daniel L. Schwartz, Nathan P. Gibson, and Katayoun Torabi, Modeling a Born-Digital Factoid Prosopography using the TEI and Linked Data, Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, (2022), https://journals.openedition.org/jtei/3979.

Factoid Prosopography

Traditional prosopographical methods rely on print publications to collect prose descriptions of individuals appearing in historical sources. These magisterial works, such as the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, eds. A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, and John Morris, (1971-1982), required multiple volumes and were very difficult to update as knowledge developed. The print medium also suffered from constraints regarding scale. This required difficult editorial decisions about whom the editors included and whom they left out. The resulting works typically focus on elite, male figures related to political and military developments.

A group of scholars at King's College London sought to leverage digital technologies for prosopographical research by developing methodologies that could capture prosopographical information in a database. This would allow a scale that could include all persons, not just political elites, and would expose that information to computational analysis. The term they chose for the discrete pieces of personal information entered into the database was "factoid".

Most factoid prosopography uses a relational database for this work. SPEAR, along with Syriaca.org, has preferred to use TEI XML as a data format due to its ability to integrate structured, semi-structured, and unstructured (prose) data. This offers the benefits of scale and computational analysis while also leaving room for some of the idiosyncratic features of ancient source material.

SPEAR uses a "factoid" approach to prosopography to capture data points asserted in historical texts. A factoid differs from a fact in that it indicates an assertion made by a primary source text, rather than a piece of information that a modern editor necessarily affirms as true. This approach allows for the fullest dataset possible and captures data of particular importance for social history. For example, a fictional biography of a saint can still reveal a great deal of information about how people understood saints and the town councilors, clergy, and peasants with whom they interacted. The factoid approach is critical for creating a database of use to social historians as well as historians of the political or religious institutions upon which traditional print prosopographies have focused.

Integration with Syriaca.org

Syriaca.org produces what are referred to as "authority files". Authority files identify an entity relevant to the field of Syriac Studies (persons, places, works, manuscripts, keyword concepts, and bibliographic items), assign each entity a so-called "cool URI" (a Uniform Resource Identifier that when entered into a web browser resolves to a page of information about the entity), and collects information about that entity with an eye toward ensuring disambiguation between easily confused entities. Each file also contains links to other files which produces a graph of knowledge about those entities.

SPEAR uses this collection of URIs to model prosopographical information about persons, places, relationships, occupations, etc. that are derived from primary source texts.