Modeling historical social networks databases

Abstract

Historical social networks are analyzed using prosopographical methods. Prosopography is a branch of historical research that focuses on the identification of social networks that appear in historical sources. It aims to represent and to interpret historical data, sourced from texts. Conceptual modeling imparts the capability to process these large data sets. This paper outlines a conceptual approach to designing a prosopographical database encompassing uncertainty. Our contribution is threefold: i) a generic certainty-based prosopographical conceptual model; ii) two meta-models with a mapping between them; iii) an illustrative example generating a customized prosopographical relational model. Unlike past approaches, our design process helps us to integrate disparate points of view as expressed in the prosopography community. We apply our approach to the prosopographical database Studium Parisiense dedicated to members of Paris schools and university between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. This instantiation validates the usefulness of our approach.