This is a paper delivered by Harold Short and John Bradley at the ACH/ALLC conference Athens Georgia 2003

At King’s College London, we are embarked on three major historial projects that violate almost all of the guidelines evidently considered to be fundamental by Townsend, Chappell and Struijyé for an appropriate application of relational database technology. The Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire (PBE) (recently renamed Prosopography of the Byzantine World — PBW), the Prosopography of Anglo-saxon England (PASE), and the Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCE) (All are funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Board) run as collabroative projects between King’s Centre for Computing in the Humanities and discipline specialist at King’s and elsewhere. The goals of these three projects are ambitious. PBE’s goal is “to record in a computerised relational database all surviving information about every individual mentioned in Byzantine sources during the period from 641 to 1261, and every individual mentioned in non-Byzantine sources during the same period who is ‘relevant’ (on a generous interpretation) to Byzantine affairs.” (from website, see references). PASE’s aim is “to provide a comprehensive biographical register of recorded inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England (c. 450-1066).” (from website). CCE intends to create a “database of clergymen of the Church of England between 1540 and 1835″. (from website). These three projects, then, are all broadly prosopographical in orientation and, if we apply Digitising History’s guidelines, seem inappropriate for relational database technology, indeed for PBW and PASE perhaps extremely so (link).