Research

Berkeley Prosopography Services (BPS) provides a new set of tools for prosopography - the identification of individuals and study of their interactions - in support of humanities research. Prosopography is an discipline well-served by digital tools; it is a humanities discipline in which the computational and data-driven methods at home in “Big Data” research can transform scholarly workflows, regardless of the size of the datasets. BPS is based upon re-usable infrastructure, supporting generalized web services for corpus management, social network analysis, and visualization.

"Richard Pryor's Peoria" opens up the genre of biography for the digital age. Traditionally, biographers have done their research—rooted around in archives, conducted their interviews, sleuthed for missing puzzle pieces—and then streamlined that research to write the story of the person in question. Our site is an interactive archive of the first two decades of the life of Richard Pryor in Peoria, Illinois.

This project is as a wiki-based catalogue of the paintings and drawings by Jan Brueghel, his workshop, and his imitators. This includes a corpus of perhaps 500-600 works that are entirely or largely the work of Jan himself, and hundreds more copies and variants. In the wiki, each of these objects has its own page with an image and full cataloging data and bibliography; behind each of these pages, a discussion page allows other facts and opinions to be added.

Originally conceived of as a complex digital object comprising audio clips from field dialect recordings coordinated with text files containing analysis on several levels, the Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition project is now being prepared as an interactive database. The central focus remains the collection of interviews, each of which is available both as an audio file and in text format. The texts are currently being transcribed, translated, annotated, and entered into the database.