Traces though Time: Prosopography in practice across Big Data

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The growing availability of large digital historical datasets, coupled with the emergence of new methodologies and computer algorithms has the potential to revolutionise research in the Arts and Humanities. The right Big Data tools and approaches will deliver the potential to conduct research on the scale of entire populations - addressing key research questions and offering new insights.Significant investment has already been sunk into the creation of large-scale digital resources. This investment is delivering historical big data of a variety, complexity and coverage that is beyond the scope of existing analytical tools and techniques. Yet these tools have not yet been the subject of large investment. Researchers in this field now require rapid innovation to extend the Big Data approaches pioneered for scientific and business applications, adapting and refining these to deliver practical analytical tools to support large-scale exploration of big historical datasets.This innovative, multi-disciplinary project will address this challenge, bringing together international research experience in the digital humanities, natural language processing, information science, data mining and linked data, with large, complex and diverse 'big data' spanning over 500 years of British history.The project's technical outputs will be a methodology and supporting toolkit that identify individuals within and across historical datasets, allowing people to be traced through the records and enabling their stories to emerge from the data. The tools will handle the 'fuzzy' nature of historical data, including aliases, incomplete information, spelling variations and the errors that are inevitably encountered in official records. The toolkit will be open and configurable, offering the flexibility to formulate and ask interesting questions of the data, exploring it in ways that were not imagined when the records were created. The open approach will create opportunities for further enhancement or re-use and offers the further potential to deliver the outputs as a service, extensible to new datasets as these become available. This brings the vision of 'bring your own data' closer, to find and link individuals in new combinations of datasets, from the widest range of historical sources.The project will benefit academic and leisure historians alike, across the whole spectrum of digital history: * It will assist historians seeking evidence of life-events through a collective study of individual biographies.* It will help genealogists find and trace the paths of their ancestors across the landscape of the official record.* It will help researchers by signposting routes between historical collections, enabling links between datasets at a deep level and creating opportunities for discovery.* For cultural organizations it will illuminate effective approaches to creation and curation of new digital datasets to optimise their potential for linking and re-use.* It will provide evidence to support policy making, helping balance the demands of Data Protection and information assurance with those of open data and Freedom of Information.* It will provide a methodology to underpin the creation of new tools and resources, supporting the digital economy.The project aims to extend the boundaries of current research in three important directions: to increase the extent and diversity of the data that can be handled; to improve support for inconsistent or fuzzy data; and to enable confidence measures to be tailored to fit specific research aims. These advances will extend the practical application of data linking techniques, enabling them to be applied to the large, diverse datasets that are continually emerging, to help answer historical research questions at a macro and micro scale. Our vision is to create a generic, extensible approach to tracing the lives of real people: through time and across the documentary evidence that survives them.