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.

As the librarian for history and history of science, I do not have to be an expert on digital humanities theory or applications, but given the burgeoning interest on this campus in DH, I feel like I need at least some rudimentary understanding of some of the tools commonly used and what they can do.

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.