Connecting Late Antiquities

连接晚期古物（CLA）是一个雄心勃勃的项目，使用新的数字方法来改变我们对古代世界末期社会关系的理解。古代晚期，大约跨越公元3世纪到7世纪，是一个戏剧性变化的时期，特别是随着基督教及其教会组织的发展，以及罗马帝国的政治结构被一些独立的继承王国所取代。人学研究这个极其重要的领域，传统上关注的是构成社会和政治精英的少数特权阶层，而很少关注社会的其他阶层，这些人虽然在现存的资料中没有得到很好的体现，但仍然留下了他们生活的证据，特别是在铭文和纸莎草纸中。以前的项目，试图目录晚古董的人省略了这些次精英，以及分离的“世俗”领域的政府从“宗教”领域的教会，从而加剧了他们作为不同的领域，其接触有时会导致紧张局势和冲突的概念。因此，这种方法有可能在一个更加流动和相互联系的世界上强加现代的区别。我们的项目建立在最近挑战这些分类的学术基础上，同时也展示了关联数据在学术界和更广泛地丰富对过去社会的理解的潜力。我们将开始，数字化和更新不朽的三卷本《罗马帝国后期人学》（专注于帝国政府成员，目前只有印刷版），并通过剑桥大学出版社网站公开提供这本书及其基础数据。长期以来一直希望有一个在线版本，但最近的情况突出了这项任务的重要性。我们的另一个主要数字输出将是中央CLA电子资源，根据最新的链接数据标准构建，将PLRE数据与来自教会的prosopography和英国次级精英的幸存证据的新条目相联合收割机。这将使我们能够完成对罗马帝国后期西部特定地区的两个案例研究：第一个案例是关于北非，探讨了当地精英进入神职人员的运动以及社交网络在他们职业生涯中所扮演的角色以及与社区的关系;第二个，关于古代晚期的英国，超越社会的最高阶层，探索与次精英的互动以及他们所享有的流动程度。这个新的CLA资源也将成为一个框架，用于链接到各种在线存储库中包含的有关晚期古人的其他信息，包括传记词典，雕像，铭文和纸莎草纸数据库以及博物馆目录。这个中心枢纽将使用户更容易访问目前分散在大量不同网站上的大量材料，从而为已完成的数字项目注入新的活力，并为新项目提供稳定的基础。虽然这项工作将在资助期结束后继续进行，但我们将优先考虑与我们的案例研究直接相关的项目的链接，包括信仰迁移的数据库：古代晚期的文书流放（325-600）和盎格鲁-撒克逊英格兰的人学，以及一些在线博物馆目录，以展示这种方法的实用性和附加值。

Connecting Late Antiquities (CLA) is an ambitious project using new digital methods to transform our understanding of social relationships at the end of the ancient world. Late antiquity, spanning roughly the third to seventh centuries AD, was a time of dramatic change, especially with the growth of Christianity and its ecclesiastical organisation and the replacement of the political structure of the Roman empire with a number of independent successor kingdoms. The vitally important field of prosopographical scholarship has traditionally focused on the privileged few who constituted the social and political elite, paying little attention to the rest of society who, although not as well represented in the surviving sources, have nonetheless left behind evidence of their lives, particularly in inscriptions and papyri. Previous projects that sought to catalogue late-antique people omitted these sub-elites, as well as separating the 'secular' sphere of government from the 'religious' sphere of the Church, thereby exacerbating a notion of them as distinct realms whose contacts sometimes led to tension and conflict. Such an approach therefore runs the risk of imposing modern distinctions on a much more fluid and interconnected world.Our project builds on recent scholarship that challenges these categorisations, while also demonstrating the potential of linked data to enrich the understanding of past societies both in academic circles and more widely. We will begin by digitising and updating the monumental three-volume Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (focused on members of the imperial government and currently only available in print) and making this and its underlying data publicly available via the Cambridge University Press website. An online version has long been desirable, but recent circumstances have underlined the importance of this task. Our other major digital output will be a central CLA electronic resource, constructed according to up-to-date standards for linked data, which will combine the PLRE data with new entries drawn from prosopographies of the Church and surviving evidence for sub-elites in Britain. This will allow us to complete two case studies of specific western regions of the later Roman empire: the first, on North Africa, explores the movement of local elites into the clergy and the roles played in their careers by social networks and relationships with their communities; the second, on late-antique Britain, moves beyond the highest echelons of society to explore interactions with sub-elites and the degree of mobility they enjoyed. This new CLA resource will also become a framework for linking to other information about late-antique people contained in a variety of online repositories, including biographical dictionaries, databases of statues, inscriptions and papyri, and museum catalogues. This central hub will make it much easier for users to access the wealth of material that is currently fragmented across a great number of disparate sites, thereby breathing new life into completed digital projects and providing a stable base for new ones. While this work will be ongoing after the end of the funded period, we will be prioritising the linking of projects which are directly relevant to our case studies, including the databases of Migrations of Faith: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity (325-600) and the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England, as well as a number of online museum catalogues, in order to demonstrate the utility and added value of this approach.