Welcome to Berkeley Prosopography Services

BPS is still under development but many of its features are ready for use or for exploration.

Explore Berkeley Prosopography Services

If you simply want to test-drive the tool kit, the following guidelines may be helpful.

  1. Sign in as Reader. Use reader as the password.
  2. Once you hit enter, you will see the blue nav bar at the top.
    1. Click on Corpus.
    2. We recommend that you select HBTIN2 for your exploration.
  3. You will now see a list of all the texts in the HBTIN2 corpus.
    1. By selecting any number in the Document column, you will see all the NAME-ROLE-ACTIVITY in DOCUMENT (NRAD) instances in that text.
  4. Select Return to Corpus Details (top right) to explore the inventory of person names and clan names.
    1. You can sort the inventory of name instances with the filter buttons (by role OR by gender). Press GO to process the search.
    2. You can also sort by the column headings.
    3. At this point, the number of instances of a name in the entire corpus are associated with the transliterations of the names, which begin about 1/2-way down the list. Use the right scroll bar in your browse to get there more quickly.
  5. Workspace: This is where disambiguation takes place, where the SNA is processed, and the graph viz is generated. It is also the place where the researchers can explore multiple cases of analysis, the “What If” Scenarios, process, save and share results. At this time, it is not possible for a Reader to view Workspaces.
  6. Settings: heart of the disambiguation: Corpus/domain expert determines. Are corpus specific, and reflect the way the corpus, or the discipline thinks about how Name Instances are disambiguated into Persons. These must be written by the corpus expert, BPS will help integrate them into the architecture.

To continue with your exploration, please click here to go a series of screenshots that illustrate functionality available to a registered user and screenshots of planned functionality?

  1. There, figures A and B illustrate aspects of the humanities research workflow in the demonstrator corpus.
  2. Figure C is the BPS architecture diagram.
  3. Figures F and G illustrate the probabilistic modeling of assertions that is at the heart of BPS.
  4. Figures H-M are screenshots of planned development, and reflect current thinking about how to express the functionality.
  5. Figure N is a screenshot of the Family Tree generator. It is functional, but is not yet connected to the BPS UI.

We encourage you to let us know what you think about BPS, both the functional and to-be-developed segments, and how it would support your research agenda

Do I have to register and log in?

No, you can browse public views and corpora without registering or logging in to BPS.

Still have questions?

If you are having problems or have questions or comments, please let us know using the contact page. Thanks!