Developing onomastic gazetteers and prosopographies for the ancient world through named entity recognition and graph visualization: Some examples from trismegistos people

Abstract

Developing prosopographies or onomastic lists in a non-digital environment used to be a painstaking and time-consuming exercise, involving manual labour by teams of researchers, often taking decades. For some scholarly disciplines from the ancient world this is still true, especially those studying non-alphabetical writing systems that lack a uniform transcription system, e.g. Demotic. But for many others, such as Greek and Latin, digital full text corpora in Unicode are now available, often even freely accessible. In this paper we illustrate, on the basis of Trismegistos, how data collection through Named Entity Recognition and visualization through Social Network Analysis have huge potential to speed up the creation of onomastic lists and the development of prosopographies.