The role of evidence based prosopography in the digital study of past human lives

Beer-Jones, Kelvin ORCID: 0000-0003-0317-4578 (2026). The role of evidence based prosopography in the digital study of past human lives. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

The Semantic Web presents an opportunity to study Past Human Lives (PHL) and their relationships. Information about PHL resides largely in the physical records in the archives and in digital representations on genealogical platforms. Information about PHL is not Born Digital, so to study PHL digitally, physical information in its original form must first be digitally represented. This is challenging because information about PHL is mostly
unstructured, messy and incomplete, and therefore largely unsuitable for digital study as data.
This thesis addresses the problematic relationship between ‘information’ (physical) and ‘data’ (digital) and the lack of comprehensive infrastructure provision for researchers into PHL in digital form. This concern is addressed by showing how extending digital infrastructure to embrace Evidence Based Prosopography (EBP), organised in a National Authority Indexing system and based on Unique Identifiers (NAI-UIDs), ensures that
information about PHL is represented digitally in a structured and useful format, thus enabling researchers to take full advantage of the Semantic Web. Issues such as fixity, affixedness and provenance tracking are addressed. The EBP system is based on linking existing data matching practices in genealogy, and existing catalogue and finding aids in academia, and it utilises UID structures common to both. Current Digital Humanities (DH) infrastructure is shown to be sufficiently mature to now extend its provision by adopting the EBP and NAI system.
This study is informed by a digital research project that models relationships between 3000 activists from 1830 to 1870, with 600 Quakers among them. This included design and build of a Human Data Digital Toolkit (HDDT) to organise and manage an EBP dataset combined from several archival sources in a variety of data formats. This ‘Independent Researcher’ project was compared with five other contemporaneous (larger and well resourced) research affordances taken from different countries, to show how the Independent Researcher model is not impaired when compared to much larger projects, and that the Independent Researchers needs bridge the gap between academia and genealogy.
The study concludes by demonstrating how the extension of infrastructure provision to include the EBP system will provide significant improvement to infrastructure support for researchers, from large well-resourced down to Independent Researcher projects, across academia and genealogy, and across society. The EBP system addresses key issues in data management, especially the three essential relationships between information and data – fixity, affixedness and provenance. It also provides a structured infrastructure which supports data interoperability and sustainability. The practical next steps necessary to develop the EBP system are set out.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):