Medieval Studies in the Digital Age Series Launch: Professor Mathisen to Talk on Prosopographical Databases

Medieval Studies in the Digital Age Seminar and Workshop Series at Leeds will be launched with Professor Ralph W. Mathisen’s seminar entitled ‘ “Garbage In Garbage Out”: The Unfulfilled Promise of Prosopographical Databases’ on 18 November 2014, Tuesday.

Ralph W. Mathisen is Professor of History, Classics, and Medieval Studies at the Department of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA, and he will be talking about how prosopographical databases can be created and thus help us to understand how people interacted with each other in the past. He will then speculate about why the great promise ofprosopographical databases never has come to fruition. Read more about Professor Mathisen’s seminar.

You can read two previously published articles by Professor Mathisen on the topic online:

‘The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, in Fifty Years of Prosopography: The Later Roman Empire, Byzantium and Beyond, ed. by Averil Cameron, Proceedings of the British Academy 118 (Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy, 2003), 23-40

‘Where are all the PDBs?: The Creation of Prosopographical Databases for the Ancient and Medieval Worlds’, in Prosopography Approaches and Applications: A Handbook, ed. by K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Prosopographica et Genealogica 13 (Oxford: Occasional Publications UPR, 2007), 95-126

Also, see a selection of his publications made available on his Academia.edu page.

The seminar will take place at the Le Patourel Room, 4.06, Parkinson Building, University of Leeds and start with tea and coffee at 5:30 pm. All of our events are free of charge and everyone is welcome but spaces will be limited so we kindly ask you to register via Eventbrite.