Background and Setup

Before using the Prosopography Wizard, you need to have already parsed lexical items as Personal Names. See the Parse Wizard for instructions on how to do this efficiently. The parsing must be done using predefined property values in OCHRE in order to trigger the wizard-driven analysis. For the prosopography tool, the only required property value is the "Personal name" value; it must be used in some context in the property description. Here is an example of how a typical personal name might be tagged in the glossary:

• Create a branch of your taxonomy to use for the discourse analysis. That is, you need to set up descriptive properties for tagging a "word" (discourse unit) that represents a personal name with prosopographical details. In order to trigger the wizard's features you must graft into your own project taxonomy the predefined "Prosopographic analysis" property value, and the predefined "Person" property variable from the master OCHRE project. The Person variable is a relational variable that will link directly to a Person item. Use the Linked Items pane to link in the following items.

• Create other Predefinitions that give you options to describe the Person items identified by the prosopographic analysis. Group these person-related predefinitions together in a hierarchy in the Predefinitions category. Identify this hierarchy of person-related Predefinitions ("Prosopography" below) to OCHRE on the Project, Preferences, Tools pane.

You are now ready to begin using the Wizard!

ProTo will search the Text to find all of the discourse units identified as "word" items that have been parsed as Personal Names. That is, a word will qualify for consideration if it has been linked to an attested form in the glossary, which in turn belongs to a grammatical form that has been described as a Proper noun/Personal name. There is a special exception for compound names such as PN1 son of PN2. The constituent elements of a compound name can be collected under a common discourse unit. This compound discourse unit should also be classified as a "word." If any of the constituent elements of the compound name meet the necessary criteria, the ProTo wizard will also consider the compound name to be a personal name. In other words, the user does not have to link the compound name to an attested form in the dictionary. (But they may chose to do so if desired.)

A word will be removed from consideration if it already has the predefined "Prosopographic analysis" value assigned. This is true whether or not the predefined Person property is present, leaving open the possibility that although this word has been analyzed it was not possible to identify the named Person.

The currently selected word appears highlighted in the text and is shown in the first field of the Wizard. The number in parentheses to the right indicates the number of times this name was found in this Text.

If OCHRE finds a Person that matches the dictionary lemma of the attested form linked to this word, it displays the matching person in the "Matching person(s)" pick-list. (NOTE: the wizard also adds any matches based solely on the attested form of the name.) The number in parentheses indicates the number of Persons in the Persons & Organizations category that match this name. OCHRE will search through the entire Persons & Organizations hierarchy to find a match. In the example above, the discourse unit tlmyn is linked to an attested form in the dictionary (talmiyāni), which belongs to the lemma tlmyn. ProTo takes the value of the lemma (tlmyn) and searches for a match in the Persons & Organizations hierarchy. There is a Person named Tamiyānu, which has tlmyn as an alias, so the match was successful.

At this point you can select one of the matching persons provided or you can add a new Person ("Add new person") to the Persons & Organizations category. Any new Persons are added to the Inbox of the Persons & Organizations category. You can move them later into appropriate hierarchies. You can also use the Linked Items pane to manually find a Person from the Persons category. This might be useful for identifying broken words or for the cases where you have other context for knowing which person is being named. Use the link-field provided to link in the selected person from the Linked Items pane so that it becomes available to ProTo. Note that an item in the link-field will take precedence over an item in the pick-list.

Add properties to the Person, if desired, by clicking the “Describe selected person” button. The Predefinitions you created above and identified on the Tools configuration pane will be available to be applied to the person you are describing.

As you can see, there are a variety of ways to Accept the selected/matching Person for the currently selected word.

• "Accept; Describe current word" pops up a dialog where you can add further descriptive properties to this word. For example, you might want to add details of this attestation of this Person like the social status, or occupational role, suggested by the word in this context. The Save and Cancel buttons here apply to the editing of the properties. Use Save and Close to finish editing. Since the Person has already been accepted for this word, the Wizard will automatically move on to consider the next word. Use Abandon to undo the property changes -- including the accepting of the initial predefinition properties. This, in effect, will leave the word as it was and will return you to the same word to try again.

• Accept applies the predefinition to the word and moves on to the next word.

• Accept Uncertain marks the Person as uncertain in the application of the predefinition and moves on to the next word.

• Accept All applies the predefinition to every attestation of this word in the text. These will already be highlighted by ProTo.

Other options are available for navigating through the list of words to be considered.

• Previous lets you navigate to the nearest, previous name in the text that is still un-described, if any.

• Skip will pass over the currently selected word and move on to the next one.

• Skip all will pass over the currently selected word and ignore all of the other attestations of this same word in this text. It will still let you consider the remaining personal names.

• Use Done when you are finished.