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29 May 2013

Personography Progress

After lengthy debate, we decided to deprecate "fict" and "myth" as values for the @type attribute we use to distinguish types of people in our Personography. We’ve merged mythical and fictional people into what we’ll now call literary figures. From now on, we’ll tag allegorical, mythological, biblical, and dramatic characters in PERS1.xml with:
<persName type="lit">
  <!-- Personography entry here -->
</persName>
One of the challenges of building a prosopography is developing an ontology of meaningful categories that are granular enough to allow for the distinctions one might wish to query yet not so granular that an item falls into more than one category. An additional challenge for us is that our prosopography (unlike that of most other projects) includes real people and literary characters. Over the years, we’ve had many amusing debates about whether a character in a mayoral show or play should be categorized as mythical, allegorical, or biblical. But the literary critics who use our texts will make those highly interpretive decisions if they want to. Meanwhile, we will introduce some new @type values to create further distinctions between various types of historical people.