Abstract: They all have the same name! Using Berkeley Prosopography Services to tame the Hellenistic Uruk onomasticon
By Laurie Pearce, University of California, Berkeley
American Oriental Society Meeting 2017
Saturday March 18th afternoon - ANE IV, Bunker Hill Room
Omni Hotel, California Plaza, 251 South Olive Street, Los Angeles
The widespread use of papponymy throughout the onomasticon of Hellenistic Uruk poses special challenges to the identification of individuals and social networks of their interactions. Broken and incomplete data complicate the task of determining which name instances label the same person; the corpus expert integrates knowledge of many features of the corpus to mitigate the challenge of disambiguating individuals from, for example, 425 instances of the name Anu-uballiṭ. Berkeley Prosopography Services (BPS) is a digital toolkit that supports this task. Unlike many digital tools available, the integrated environment of BPS emulates the workflow and heuristics researchers employ in disambiguating names and generates visualizations of the resulting networks. Using probabilistic algorithms, it supports investigation of the likelihood that two or more name instances do or do not identify the same individual and the various “what if” scenarios that result from these assumptions.
This paper will begin with a description of the conceptual foundations of BPS, how it emulates heuristics domain experts apply in preparing name instances for disambiguation and corpora for SNA, and they ways it may support innovate research agendas. It will demonstrate the workflow that leads to the creation of SNA visualizations for specific families and professions. The well-documented Nana-iddin family and an in-progress exploration of the activities of a scholar-scribe will provide the data for these test cases. The potential of such visualizations to facilitate new research agendas inhibited by traditional print publications will also be explored.