Syriaca.org editor Prof. Daniel L. Schwartz will present a paper, “Syriac Persons, Events, and Relations (SPEAR)”, at the Symposium Syriacum XII, held at the Pontificio Instituto Orientale in Rome, Italy on August 20, 2016. The abstract for the paper is below:
Recent prosopographical work within the fields of Late Antique, Byzantine, and Anglo-Saxon studies have produced powerful research tools for studying a wide range of historical actors. Nevertheless, the treatment of Syriac persons in these databases remains far from comprehensive. This paper will present the early phase of Syriac Persons, Events, and Relations (SPEAR), a digital database of named and unnamed persons currently based on the Chronicle of Edessa and the letters of Severus of Antioch but soon to expand rapidly. It will demonstrate the value of producing a prosopography comprised of linked open data. Traditional print prosopographies face limits of scale and great difficulty incorporating data from new research. The digital nature of SPEAR allows for theoretically unlimited data from ongoing and future research projects. Encoding the prosopography in TEI (an XML markup language) produces a powerful tool that enables links to other datasets in Syriaca.org dealing with places, manuscripts, hagiography, etc. The presentation will highlight the ability of SPEAR to offer researchers visualizations of these social networks.