Berkeley Prosopography Services, a tool for historical social network analysis originally developed for use with an Uruk text corpus from the Hellenistic period (331-46 BCE), is currently in the process of being generalized for use with a variety of corpora.

DH Fellow Eduardo Escobar, a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies, has turned to network analysis to study semantic and social networks in the history of science. In network analysis, a graph’s nodes (e.g. people, places, words) and their connecting edges (kinship, trade routes, synonyms) are visualized, with the goal of providing scholars with new insights.

On April 7th and 8th, Berkeley’s digital humanities community gathered to share research and celebrate an exciting year of forging new collaborations.  

Prosopography, the identification and disambiguation of name instances and the study of the interactions and life histories of the people involved, is at the core of many humanities research agendas. Berkeley Prosopography Services (BPS) is a digital tool kit for the disambiguation of namesakes in text corpora, computation of  social network metrics, and generation of  interactive visualizations of those networks.

Berkeley Prosopography Services (BPS) is a digital tool kit that supports the disambiguation of namesakes in text corpora, computes social network metrics, and generates interactive visualizations of those networks.  Within the framework of the Social Science Matrix Prospecting Seminars, BPS is developing new research partners, both on and off campus.

Digital humanities research at Berkeley will be well represented at the MLA convention in Chicago, January 9-12, 2014, with Berkeley scholars participating in the following sessions: