Linked Pasts 6 People and Names activity (and SNAP development)

[Gabriel Bodard]

Dear colleagues,

A dozen or so new members have joined this list this week, mostly to take part in the Linked Pasts discussion and sprint over the next couple weeks. For those of you who don't know, there are three historical person-themed working groups being led at the Linked Pasts 6 symposium, which are described in more detail in this shared document (activities 4.1–4.3 if the bookmark doesn't jump straight there).

• 4.1 Nathan Gibson is leading a series of activities around the Historical Middle Eastern Data Alliance
• 4.2 There is some interest in discussing and updating SNAP:DRGN recommendations and TM People
• 4.3 Greta Hawes is leading discussion around Greco-Roman mythical people

These groups are all related and there is significant overlap in both personnel and activity. I would like to invite ayone who is interested to take part in the activity surrounding SNAP:DRGN. There are four possible goals of this working group, depending in interest, expertise, and available time of participants:

1. Revisit and update the shared data recommendations in the SNAP Cookbook
2. (perhaps in the light of [1]) Examine and update the SNAP Ontology
3. (advanced) Discuss the desirability of and strategy for rescue and sustainability of the SNAP 1.0 triplestore
4. (very advanced) Continue work on SNAP-compliant person-search for Recogito (started at an EDH hackathon a couple years ago)

If you would like to join us to discuss whether any or some of these aims are of interest, please come along for a preliminary chat at 15:30 UTC tomorrow (Weds Dec 9), in the Wonder.me room that was used for the LP6 poster session last week (if you don't have the address and password, please contact me off-list).

Please feel free to discuss any of this on-list as well, especially if you can't make tomorrow's time-slot at this short notice (for which our apologies).

All best,

Gabby

==
Dr Gabriel BODARD (he/him)
Reader in Digital Classics

Institute of Classical Studies
University of London
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU
 
E: Gabriel...@sas.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)20 78628752 

 
Especially at the moment, I may email at odd hours of the day and night/days of the week. I do not ever expect a reply outside of your working hours.

[Gabriel Bodard]

Dear all,

A small group (Yanne Broux, Richard Light, Ulrike Peter, Alexander Ilan-Tomich, Achille Felicetti and I) had a preliminary chat in the Wonder.me room yesterday afternoon, in which we reminded ourselves of the SNAP:DRGN cookbook (vintage 2015), thought about a few other communities and standards to map it again (genealogy, Cidoc), and started thinking about revising/simplifying the "annotation" property for SNAP.

(Some of my colleagues may have comments to report on individual things that came up.)

We would like to organise a follow-up meeting, preferably with more interested members of the SNAP/ancient-people communities, in the next few days. I have put up a Doodle poll at <https://doodle.com/poll/xavpmf926c7e2s6m> to attempt to find a slot that is convenient for as many of us as possible. Please fill this in today if you would like to join us.

Many thanks, and all best,

Gabby

==
Dr Gabriel BODARD (he/him)
Reader in Digital Classics

Institute of Classical Studies
University of London
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU
 
E: Gabriel...@sas.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)20 78628752 

 
Especially at the moment, I may email at odd hours of the day and night/days of the week. I do not ever expect a reply outside of your working hours.

---

From: Gabriel Bodard
Sent: 08 December 2020 16:35
To: ancient...@googlegroups.com <ancient...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Linked Pasts 6 People and Names activity (and SNAP development)

 

[Gabriel Bodard]

Hi all,

It looks like the best (but not perfect) time for a follow-up meeting on the SNAP cookbook will be 14:00 UTC (link to help check timezones!) on Monday, December 14. This means that we're unlikely to get another meeting in before the final report to Linked Pasts 6 on Wednesday afternoon, but if we have at least come up with a working group and pathway forward by then, we can report on that, and invite people to keep in touch. Let's meet in the "People and Names" space of the Wonder.me poster hall (contact me offlist if you don't have the link and password).

For anyone who can't make that time, please feel free to discuss here any issues in the SNAP Cookbook (development version at <http://bit.ly/SNAPcookbook>), ask for clarification or suggest improvements (especially to the "attestation" section). Likewise any of the other topics that were originally proposed for this activity.

All best,

Gabby

==
Dr Gabriel BODARD (he/him)
Reader in Digital Classics

Institute of Classical Studies
University of London
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU
 
E: Gabriel...@sas.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)20 78628752 

 
Especially at the moment, I may email at odd hours of the day and night/days of the week. I do not ever expect a reply outside of your working hours.

---

From: Gabriel Bodard <gabriel...@sas.ac.uk>
Sent: 10 December 2020 12:06
To: ancient...@googlegroups.com <ancient...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Linked Pasts 6 People and Names activity (and SNAP development)

 

[Greta Hawes]

Dear Gabby,

Many thanks for leading this - unfortunately I cannot join the meeting, so I'm putting down some thoughts here. 

Scott Smith and I have developed a dataset of c. 3500 mythical people as part of MANTO (https://www.manto-myth.org/).  They comprise all significant mythical agents and collectives mentioned in Homer, Hesiod, Apollodoros, Pausanias, and Dionysios Periegetes.  These will be available online via a public interface by the end of February.  The project is built in Nodegoat, so can be queried through an API, and exported as .csv files.  

The dataset is quite rich -- the entities are properly disambiguated and identified by URIs. We should have no problem supplying the data described in the cookbook under i - ix (with the proviso that date and occupation are  irrelevant!). Each entity is connected to attestations in the form of passage references which include the CTS-URN (currently in the form of URLs for Scaife Viewer). 

I've been working my way through the Cookbook and two things leapt out -- 

The first is the 'types' ontology from LAWD.  In MANTO we distinguish only between individuals ('agents') and groups ('collectives'). We didn't find it helpful to apply a gods / heroes / creatures distinction (is Heracles god or hero?  is Geryon hero or mythic creature?). Our data would thus appear entirely under the type 'agent' or 'agent:group'.  Is this appropriate, or is it worth finding a way to distinguish mythic agents in some other way?  

The second: why is gender not included as (e.g.) a disambiguator, but left to be implicitly defined through the relationships connections? After a bit of trial and error, we ended up doing it the other way: making gender (female, male, undefined) an attribute of the entity and keeping the relationships gender-neutral ('child of', 'spouse of').  This proved necessary with agents (primarily monsters) whose gender is unclear, but more importantly with groups of mixed gender with a common genealogical identity (e.g. the Niobids) which need gender-neutral relationship identifiers.  

Anyway, I'm well out over my depth with the technical aspects of this, so happy to play the useful idiot if needed. 

Kind regards,

Greta. 

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[John Muccigrosso]

Greta,

Thanks for the message. I'm looking forward to playing some with Manto!

To respond to part of what you say, in my database of classical-period temples, I track the "divinity" to whom a temple is dedicated. In this context, the difference between a "god" and a "hero" seems relevant. I'm not sure this holds for every case, but I tend to think that gods are born gods, but heroes are made into them. To take your example, Herakles is a hero in this formulation. I think this also means that some while gods are heroes, not all heroes are gods. There is also for me the somewhat ambiguous space created by a few temples or cults to human beings not always considered divine, for example, Helen or Menelaus at Sparta. Are there other such examples of divinities whose status is disputed and how should those be dealt with?

In a related area, I wonder how you deal with conceptual "gods" like Nike and Nemesis.

John

[Roueche, Charlotte]

For material which extends into late antiquity we have had to deal with – for example – Christian saints: we therefore have a category of Divine and sacred beings. The evidence would be cult. Worth considering

http://cultofsaints.history.ox.ac.uk/

 

The question may be, therefore, not whether divinity is disputed, but whether the person has a place in a >secular< as well as a >sacred< list – and, if so, how to mark them up

-----------------------------------------------------

Professor Charlotte Roueché

Department of Classics/Centre for Hellenic Studies

King’s College

London WC2R 2LS http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3606-2049

 

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[Monica Berti]

Dear Gabby, Dear All,

thank you for your messages.

I won’t be able to join you today in the afternoon, but I’m certainly happy to contribute to SNAP especially now that I have a DFG funded project for NER of ancient Greek: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/434173983?language=en

The Project started in October and will last six years. The task is to focus on names of authors and titles of works, but I’m generating a lot of data for ancient Greek personal names with inflected forms, lemmata and various types of annotations to produce a knowledge base of ancient Greek personal names.

Part of the work for NER is already available in the Digital Athenaeus project: http://digitalathenaeus.org  

All the best,

Monica

---
Dr. Monica Berti

monica...@uni-leipzig.de
http://www.monicaberti.com

Alte Geschichte
Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum - Universität Leipzig

Beethovenstraße 15 - 04107 Leipzig - DE

https://www.gko.uni-leipzig.de/historisches-seminar

c/o Computational Humanities and Digital Humanities
Institut für Informatik - Universität Leipzig
Augustusplatz 10 - 04109 Leipzig - DE
http://www.ch.uni-leipzig.de

https://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de 

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[A I]

Dear Gabby, dear all,

I am sorry, I also won't be able to join today due to teaching obligations. As I told you I think that first of all, Attestations and Citations (part of the LAWD ontology) need some clearing up, because the attestations of persons in primary sources are mixed up with assertions about persons made in secondary sources, which can be confusing for people trying to grasp the SNAP:DRGN approach.
Particularly the use of the Citation class is problematic in the present version. As per LAWD, "A Citation models a bibliographic reference as a resource". The SNAP Cookbook further explains "A Citation is a bibliographic reference to a resource like a book or an article." But then citations are used to link attestations with primary sources - i. e., ancient texts such as papyri rather than for bibliographic references (for example in the data imported from Trismegistos). Wouldn't it seem that Citations are not suitable for modelling relations of name or person attestation with an ancient text? Eventually, ancient texts exist regardless of whether they are published or not and as such references to ancient texts are not necessarily bibliographic. As per Oxford English Dictionary, "bibliographic" means "Of or pertaining to bibliography."  - i. e. to "The systematic description and history of books", whereas many ancient texts cannot be described as books (inscriptions on stone for example).

As a matter of introduction to this list, I need to add that I work on a database of Egyptian names and persons of the Middle Kingdom (1st half of the 2nd millennium BC), https://pnm.uni-mainz.de/info (currently a limited test dataset is published online; full version expected in 8 months).
and I aim to add an RDF-representation of my dataset using an ontology I am working on https://pnm.uni-mainz.de/ontology/
in order to allow researchers making SPARQL queries to my dataset for complex research questions https://pnm.uni-mainz.de/sparql
My Linked Pasts 6 poster is available under https://pnm.uni-mainz.de/rdf/poster.pdf
I used SNAP:DRGN cookbook as an inspiration and I would be wiling to export my data in the SNAP:DRGN format.

All the best
Alexander

Alexander Ilin-Tomich

Institute of Ancient Studies, Egyptology

FB 07

Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

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[Hugh Cayless]

Sorry for being disorganized, but I can't find a link to the meeting.

As far as Citations and Attestations go, I'm certainly open to tightening up the language of the definitions if that's helpful, but in general, we are either referring to published works or at least to something with a catalog number (even if that doesn't fit the narrow definition of "bibliographic") so I'm not sure about this objection. I think I'd argue that a mention of a person in a secondary source isn't an "attestation", but of course, there is some blurring of the lines between primary and secondary, so...

Hugh

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[Richard Light]

On 11/12/2020 11:35, Gabriel Bodard wrote:

please feel free to discuss here any issues in the SNAP Cookbook (development version at <http://bit.ly/SNAPcookbook>), ask for clarification or suggest improvements (especially to the "attestation" section). Likewise any of the other topics that were originally proposed for this activity.

Gabby,

Having volunteered to write something describing the snap:associatedEvent property, my first thought was that such events could have, as properties, associated dates, places and participants, as well as (for example) a descriptive name for the event itself. 

Is the group happy with this suggestion, or would that be seen as adding too much complexity to SNAP?  The current design consciously limits itself to simple (untyped) links between the person of interest and a person, place or date: these are what the CIDOC CRM crew would call 'short-cuts'. Being able to say that a date and place are co-contextual in the context of a single event allows for much greater precision and expressive power, at the expense of simplicity.  (One approach that other projects have adopted is to include each date, place, etc. twice in the RDF: once as a 'short-cut' property and a second time in its proper context.)

Richard

--

---

Richard Light
richard...@gmail.com
@richardofsussex

[Gabriel Bodard]

Dear all,

A final post (from me) on this thread, and then I will fork into one or two different threads to start discussion there.

This afternoon we had the second (and for now, final) meeting of the Linked Pasts 6 People and Names activity re SNAP development. A dozen people attended, and we came up with a list of the five most urgent tasks, and assigned working groups to go away for a few weeks and bring back a proposal to this list for consideration. (According to venerable tradition, some people were volunteered to join/lead groups in absentia.) We would like further volunteers to join each WG, please.

WG1: Proposal to add a gender property to SNAP Cookbook (some sensitivities required) (WG led by Gabby B, Scott S, Tom G)

WG2: Proposal to document types of person-like entity, especially for myth (WG led by Greta H, Ulrike P, Scott S, Gabby B)

WG3: Proposal to revisit the structure of attestations in the SNAP Cookbook, preferably simplifying the SNAP side of things and pointing to a bibliographical (vel sim.) construct elsewhere, with the most basic possible unit for comparison between entities. (WG led by Hugh C, Yanne B, Alberto DR, Alexander IT)

WG4: Proposal to encode qualification (e.g. uncertainty, sources, responsibility, disagreements, etc.) of assertions re identity, partial identity, relationships and other data. Possibly not in the basic (“Scearios 2”) SNAP Cookbook. (WG led by Nathan G, Gabby B, Yanne B, someone from MANTO)

WG5: Proposal to add a SNAP property for event to the disambiguator class. (WG led by Gabby B, Richard L, Tom G)

We would like further volunteers to join each WG, please!

Some WGs may begin discussion on this list, but the idea is that they will report back her after a short discussion to present a preliminary proposal to the list. At least for (1), (2) and (5) that ought to be fairly quick. (If by quick we understand, “Earlyish in the new year.”)

More soon. All best, and thanks,

[Gabriel Bodard]

Thanks for this, Richard. My instinct (other than that we should take this off-list once we have a few more volunteers to join this WG) is that all SNAP should be modelling is a snap:associatedEvent (subproperty of snap:disambiguator) that points to a URI defining the event. The date, place, other participants, outcomes, etc. of that event should be defining by the source project, perhaps in CIDOC-CRM if that's what they want, but that's no longer the basic disambiguator information that is defined in the SNAP Cookbook.

Who else would like to join Richard and me to discuss this offlist?

Cheers,

Gabby

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From: ancient...@googlegroups.com <ancient...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Richard Light <richard...@gmail.com>
Sent: 14 December 2020 16:21