Late antique prosopography and Socrates Scholasticus’ Ecclesiastical history

William Garrood, KCL

This event will be held online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d277nrTW668

Prosopography is a subject well suited to digital scholarship, and over the last few decades it has undergone profound changes in how we collate, present and locate information. New style ‘factoid’ prosopographies like the Prosopography of the Byzantine World offer the potential for new analyses and access to data. This paper examines that evolution drawing on my own digital prosopography of Socrates Scholasticus’ Ecclesiastical History. It explores decisions taken in modern prosopographies and their alternatives. In particular it looks at options around implication and aggregation, for deeper analysis of relationship information, and specific issues in Socrates’ text itself.