Connecting Late Antiquities

连接晚期文物(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尽头的社会关系的理解。古代晚期，大约跨越公元3到7世纪，是一个戏剧性的变化时期，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国所取代。传记学术这一极其重要的领域传统上侧重于少数特权阶层，他们构成了社会和政治精英，而很少关注社会其他群体，他们虽然在现存资料中没有得到很好的体现，但却留下了他们生活的证据，特别是在铭文和纸莎草书中。以前试图对晚期古董人进行分类的项目忽略了这些次级精英，并将政府的“世俗”领域与教会的“宗教”领域分开，从而加剧了一种观念，即它们是截然不同的领域，其接触有时会导致紧张和冲突。因此，这种方法存在着在一个流动性更强、联系更紧密的世界上强加现代区别的风险。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的潜力，以丰富学术界和更广泛的对过去社会的理解。我们将首先数字化和更新后来罗马帝国的不朽的三卷人像(重点关注帝国政府成员，目前只有印刷版)，并通过剑桥大学出版社的网站公开提供这些数据及其基本数据。长期以来，在线版本一直是可取的，但最近的情况突显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中央情报局的电子资源，根据最新的关联数据标准构建，它将把PLRE数据与从教会传记和英国次级精英的幸存证据中提取的新条目结合起来。这将使我们能够完成关于后来罗马帝国特定西部地区的两个案例研究：第一个案例研究北非，探索当地精英进入神职人员的流动，以及社交网络和社区关系在他们的职业生涯中扮演的角色；第二个案例，研究晚期古董时代的英国，超越社会最高层，探索与次精英阶层的互动以及他们享有的流动性程度。这一新的CLA资源还将成为一个框架，用于链接各种在线储存库中包含的关于晚期古董人的其他信息，包括传记词典、雕像数据库、铭文和纸莎草纸以及博物馆目录。这个中央枢纽将使用户更容易访问目前分散在大量不同网站的丰富材料，从而为已完成的数字项目注入新的活力，并为新的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联系，包括信仰的迁移：远古时期的神职人员流放(325-600年)和盎格鲁-撒克逊人英国的人口学数据库，以及一些在线博物馆目录，以展示这一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.