Traces though Time: Prosopography in practice across Big Data

越来越多的大型数字历史数据集，再加上新的方法和计算机算法的出现，有可能给艺术和人文学科的研究带来革命性的变化。正确的大数据工具和方法将带来在整个人口规模进行研究的潜力-解决关键的研究问题并提供新的见解。在创建大规模数字资源方面已经投入了大量投资。这项投资提供的历史大数据具有多样性、复杂性和覆盖面，超出了现有分析工具和技术的范围。然而，这些工具还没有成为大规模投资的对象。这一领域的研究人员现在需要快速创新，以扩展为科学和商业应用开创的大数据方法，调整和改进这些方法，以提供实用的分析工具，以支持对大型历史数据集的大规模探索。这个创新的、多学科的项目将应对这一挑战，汇集数字人文、自然语言处理、信息科学、数据挖掘和关联数据方面的国际研究经验，拥有跨越英国500多年历史的大型、复杂和多样化的“大数据”。该项目的技术成果将是一种方法和支持工具包，可以在历史数据集中和跨历史数据集中识别个人。使人们能够通过记录被追踪，并使他们的故事从数据中浮现出来。这些工具将处理历史数据的“模糊”性质，包括别名、不完整的信息、拼写差异和官方记录中不可避免地遇到的错误。该工具包将是开放的和可配置的，可以灵活地制定数据并提出有趣的问题，以创建记录时无法想象的方式进行探索。开放办法将为进一步改进或重复使用创造机会，并提供进一步的潜力，将产出作为一种服务交付，并可在新的数据集可用时扩展到新的数据集。这使得“带上你自己的数据”的愿景更近了一步，从最广泛的历史来源中，在新的数据集组合中找到个人并将其联系起来。该项目将使学术和休闲历史学家在整个数字历史范围内同时受益：*它将帮助历史学家通过对个人传记的集体研究来寻找生活事件的证据。*它将帮助系谱学家在官方记录的全景中找到并追踪他们祖先的路径。*它将帮助研究人员在历史收藏之间标示路线，使数据集之间在深层次上建立联系，并创造发现的机会。*对于文化组织来说，它将阐明创建和管理新的数字数据集的有效方法，以优化其链接和重复使用的潜力。*它将提供证据支持政策制定，帮助平衡数据保护和信息保证的需求，以及开放数据和信息自由的需求。*它将提供一种方法，支持创造新的工具和资源，支持数字经济。该项目旨在从三个重要方向扩展当前研究的边界：增加可处理的数据的范围和多样性；改善对不一致或模糊数据的支持；并使置信度衡量标准能够适应具体的研究目标。这些进展将扩大数据链接技术的实际应用，使其能够应用于不断涌现的大型、多样化的数据集，以帮助在宏观和微观尺度上回答历史研究问题。我们的愿景是创建一种通用的、可扩展的方法来追踪真人的生活：穿越时间和跨越他们幸存的书面证据。

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.