- This working document is work in progress about work in progress
General
- Pages about "people" are created and edited through Form:Person (deprecated) (based mainly on Template:Person). These pages are automatically added to Category:People.
- Relationship with the catalogue
- pages receive data from entries in the bibliography (and in turn, add data to the bibliography when a bibliographic record is cited a source).
- pages
- ...
Focus
Of the variety of 'persons' that are indexed by the catalogue, a number of categories deserve special attention. Semantic 'concepts', i.e. predefined queries stored in a page (without printout statements), will be used to define these categories.
- Examples
- ‘Agents’ of textual culture
- Authors as well as ascribed authors: see Concept:Authors
- Scribes and others associated with manuscript culture, such as patrons, redactors, etc.
- People mentioned in texts, usually through Property:Person in text has identifier
- Literary characters, e.g. Concept:Characters in Irish literature
Wanted features
...
Pages about "people"
Though still 'work in progress', Template:Person and Form:Person (deprecated) are to some extent ready for production.
Name
- Name
- Alternative names
- Further options:
- Given name
- Nickname
Background
- Ethnicity
....
Floruit
Shorthand reference
- e.g. "d. 890", "fl. late 9th century", "supp. fl. 5th century"
Machine-readable data
- Queries and search interfaces, once implemented, will be confined to centuries, e.g. "700-799", etc.
- Property:Person floruit start is used to define the terminus ante quem (the earliest possible date) of a person's floruit (i.e. career or life-time). Values for years before 1000 need to have an explicit statement of AD or BC, e.g. "959 AD".
- Property:Person floruit end is used to define a person's terminus post quem (the latest possible date). Values for years before 1000 need to have an explicit statement of AD or BC, e.g. "959 AD".
People whose floruits are not datable to historical times
- For people situated in a distant, legendary past (e.g. those described in pseudo-histories, Ulster Cycle, etc.) we cannot provide reliable or useful chronological anchor-points, but they can be identified by their association to particular people, especially rulers, or imaginary frameworks.
- To the extent that a sense of time and chronology is conveyed in medieval and early modern sources, it would be useful to offer a semi-chronological 'portal' to the portrayed worlds of the past.
Feast day
- Dates are formatted as day + month, e.g. "1 October", etc.
- For the purpose of the software, feast-days are examples of "recurrent events", which by their nature require the declaration of a start date and an end date. This range will be restricted to no more than a couple of years, because at this point, the modest purpose for storing feast-days is the creation and use of a recurrent calendar mapped onto a current calendar. A reconstruction of the liturgical year at any given moment in time would have been a noble goal, but there are difficulties. One is technical: the software works in such a way that a value would be given for each hypothetical instance, so if ranges are defined as occurring between the year when the feast-day was instituted and the present year, the approach would quickly overburden the system with millions of semantic values. The other issue is that even disregarding the hypothetical rather than historical nature of calendrical events, most of the time we simply do not now when they were 'instituted', etc.
- A test example of a query using the result format "calendar" can be seen here: User:DG/Calendar of saints. A new, somewhat improved result format called "eventcalendar" (example here) will be used instead.
Pages about texts
Authors and ascribed authors
There is a field for (assumed) authors as well as ascribed authors. Associated properties: Property:Authored by and Property:Ascribed to (both subproperties of Property:Text has author). In some cases, the distinction between authors who are credited with the composition of a given textual item and characters/personae who serve as speakers (esp. of poems) and are often in some way involved in the narrative, may not always be clear-cut. A separate property Property:Text has speaker may be useful neverthelesss, but has not been implemented as yet.
People mentioned in texts
Form:Text offers three ways for adding persons and peoples who receive at least a mention in a text:
- Subject (category) - to be used sparingly, e.g. to denote the protagonist of a tale (a saint in a hagiographical work or the central figure of a historical saga).
- Main characters in a text can be listed and described using the mini-form "add person"
- Characters can also be added on a per-section basis using the appropriate fields under the mini-form "add text section". This would be especially useful for minor characters or names that are mentioned only in passing. At the start of 2013, subobjects were intended to be used for greater differentiation of semantic information, but the software is not yet ready for our purposes. The new version, scheduled to be released in December 2013, should make this possible.
Pages about manuscripts
- Scribes ...
Browsing and searching
Draft notes concerning categories of people
- The tabbed sections for role by occupation, office and status represent a draft for improved handling of categorisations. Work in progress!
There are many, perhaps too many, ways in which people may be categorised, but the main criteria for our purposes may be roughly described as follows:
- (1) by their relatedness to a given aspect of a cultural region. Such relatedness can assume a variety of forms: (a) birth, descent, background; (b) activities (e.g. travel) and interests (e.g. scholarly interests) and (c) in a passive fashion, by their status in a given textual or cultural context (literary characters, saints),
- (2) by the period in which they are thought to have lived.
- (3) by their primary roles, notably what will be termed occupation, office and status. These, in turn, tend to be associated with (1b) or (1c) above.
As with every simplified model, there will be cases when this model is slightly less than ideal, but it seems to offer the best compromise between what is useful and what is feasible.
Links:
Stuff to think about
- Still allow for some automatic addition of MW categories based on values provided for properties (?). E.g. "Irish people"?
- how to build a single category/SMW concept for "people of interest to <Welsh/Irish/...etc.> studies", based on the values provided
- collective groups, e.g. Céli Dé; learned hereditary families; etc.
<headertabs/>
