Modeling Historical Social Networks Databases

Abstract

Historical social networks are analyzed using prosopographical methods. Prosopography is a branch of historical research that focuses on the identification of social networks that appear in historical sources. It aims to represent and to interpret historical data, sourced from texts. Conceptual modeling imparts the capability to process these large data sets. This paper outlines a conceptual approach to designing a prosopographical database encompassing uncertainty. Our contribution is threefold: i) a generic certaintybased prosopographical conceptual model; ii) two meta-models with a mapping between them; iii) an illustrative example generating a customized prosopographical relational model. Unlike past approaches, our design process helps us to integrate disparate points of view as expressed in the prosopography community. We apply our approach to the prosopographical database Studium Parisiense dedicated to members of Paris schools and university between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. This instantiation validates the usefulness of our approach.

Contribution of Conceptual Modeling to Enhancing Historians’ Intuition - Application to Prosopography

“…Other examples include the Roman Republic project [Figueira & Vieira, 2017] and Charlemagne's European conceptual model 1 . [Akoka et al, 2019] present a conceptual model that gathers and makes more generic the information contained in different prosopographical databases, namely the concepts of People, Factoids, Places and Sources. It also incorporates a representation of uncertainty.…”

“…The conceptual model described in Fig. 1 is adapted from [Akoka et al, 2019] in order to meet several requirements: i) encompass and put together the different viewpoints of prosopographical researchers; ii) conform to the information fusion process; iii) automatically propagate the certainty of information throughout the main concepts (mention, factoid, fact, hypothesis) as explained below (Fig. 2).…”