Social Networks in Georgian Britain

Social Networks in Georgian Britain (SNiGB) originated in 2008 when it began as the prosopography for Lord Byron and his Times (LBT), an archive of printed letters and diaries by and about Byron’s associates encoded in TEI-XML and rendered as the website LordByron.org using XSLT transformations and XPath queries. These records, used to generate footnotes, included links to name authority files such as the Library of Congress, National Archive (UK), National Portrait Gallery (UK), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), and the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). In 2014, the LBT prosopography became an XML relational database with the addition of a demographic file containing fields for place of origin and professions, with linked information about family members, educational institutions, and correspondents. Fields were hand-coded using TEI elements and included place of origin, professions, and correspondents.

From 2008 to 2012, the LBT website was hosted by Performant Software in Charlottesville, and sponsored by NINES; in 2012 web hosting was transferred to Virginia Tech University Libraries (VTUL).

Dr. Radcliffe has since added an additional 10,000+ names to the original project. This final version of SNiGB content comprising over 37,000 names has been exported into individual XML files by person and organization for the purposes of access, text mining, and reuse.