Combining the Factoid Model with TEI: examples and conceptual challenges
Creators: name: Bradley, John
name: Jakacki, Diane
Publisher: name: unknown
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Prosopography
subject: Text Encoding Initiative

description: The Factoid Model arose out of various prosopographies undertaken in partnerships with King's College London's Department of Digital Humanities (KCL DH). It first appeared in a rudimentary form in the 1990s, but in more recent times has stimulated significant interest from historians who are trying to apply formal data structures such as RDF to historical ideas. Its central idea is the factoid which has been described as "a spot in a source that says something about a person or persons." (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/factoid-prosopography/about). By being this "spot in a source", the factoid acts as a kind of nexus, or gathering point, between the historical source, the historical persons, and other aspects of the historical society being studied: historical events, of course, but also, for example, what occupations or offices operated in that society. Perhaps because the factoid model comes out of the paradigm of highly structured data, the text itself, the "spot", that is the factoid has not been explicitly given in any of KCL DH's factoid prosopographies.

TEI, of course, has been developed to represent things about textual sources. Since the factoid model is centered on spots in textual sources, is it possible to link the factoid concept to its text by bringing the two structural approaches together? TEI provides a "personography" approach to historical persons in the Guidelines, section 13: see a particular striking example in section 13.3.2.2 (Personal Events), but not all of the structure represented in the factoid model is demonstrated there.

In this presentation have examined how factoids can be represented completely in terms of slightly extended TEI markup, drawing examples from experimental markup that has been applied to the materials in the Records of Early English Drama (London) project. We also introduce some of the conceptual and technical challenges that arise from this approach.
description: The Factoid Model arose out of various prosopographies undertaken in partnerships with King's College London's Department of Digital Humanities (KCL DH). It first appeared in a rudimentary form in the 1990s, but in more recent times has stimulated significant interest from historians who are trying to apply formal data structures such as RDF to historical ideas. Its central idea is the factoid which has been described as "a spot in a source that says something about a person or persons." (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/factoid-prosopography/about). By being this "spot in a source", the factoid acts as a kind of nexus, or gathering point, between the historical source, the historical persons, and other aspects of the historical society being studied: historical events, of course, but also, for example, what occupations or offices operated in that society. Perhaps because the factoid model comes out of the paradigm of highly structured data, the text itself, the "spot", that is the factoid has not been explicitly given in any of KCL DH's factoid prosopographies. TEI, of course, has been developed to represent things about textual sources. Since the factoid model is centered on spots in textual sources, is it possible to link the factoid concept to its text by bringing the two structural approaches together? TEI provides a "personography" approach to historical persons in the Guidelines, section 13: see a particular striking example in section 13.3.2.2 (Personal Events), but not all of the structure represented in the factoid model is demonstrated there. In this presentation have examined how factoids can be represented completely in terms of slightly extended TEI markup, drawing examples from experimental markup that has been applied to the materials in the Records of Early English Drama (London) project. We also introduce some of the conceptual and technical challenges that arise from this approach.