Behind every printed national biography is a board of editors responsible for finding established scholars to write the biographies. The personal and institutional networks, the scientific and ideological socialization of these authors have a significant influence on the biographical constructs and narratives they have designed, and thus also determines the information contained in the biographies. Therefore, a source-critical approach to such biography texts is necessary. This will be exemplified using a biography selected from the Austrian Biographical Dictionary 1815-1950 (ÖBL). A complementary approach for the interpretation of biographical dictionaries is analysis of the networks, which can be reconstructed on the basis of the information contained in the biographies. As part of the APIS project, biographical data is generated through the annotation of biographies of the ÖBL. This data consists of frequently mentioned names of persons, places and institutions that can be subsumed under the term “biographical building blocks”. Biographical networks can be built on the basis of this data. In the second part of the paper, different dimensions of these networks as well as ways of analyzing this type of data will be shown.
Mainly due to the changes in information and
communication technology, the focus of recent
digital biographical dictionary projects has been on
objectives such as the effort to transform partially
structured biographical reference works into
machine-readable data, enhanced database
networking, and the exploiting of biographical data
using methods of the digital humanities or
computational linguistics
Founded in 1946 and published since
1954, the ÖBL covers not only the territory of
present-day Austria, but the entire Habsburg
empire, thus providing an image of Central
European culture between 1815 and 1950. As yet
incomplete, the reference work being elaborated by
an international collective of authors from all the
successor states of the Habsburg monarchy
currently contains around 20,000 biographies. The
dictionary has undergone several stages of
digitization
Starting with an introductory discussion of central methodological issues (Section 2) and based on selected examples, this paper deals with two complementary approaches to interpreting biographical networks. The first approach scrutinizes aspects of the genesis of the ÖBL, the networks of its biographers and their influence on biographical narratives (Section 3), while the second is devoted to analysis of the networks of biographed persons themselves (Section 4).
At present, the self-perception of the digital
humanities appears to be quite ambivalent.
Sometimes they are defined as a scientific
(sub)discipline or research field within the
humanities and cultural sciences, sometimes as a
bundle of methods, practices and concepts at the
interface between the humanities and computer
science
In the context of this study, this relates
primarily to methodology
The ÖBL thus represents not only a biographical history for the period between 1815 and 1950, but also reflects the history of narratives of Austrian historiography after the Second World War. These are to be recorded both at the level of the entire encyclopedia – e.g. relating to transnationalism vs. national biography, the multiculturalism of the monarchy and its continuity, or the interwar period narratives in the early biographies of the 1950s – as well as that of the individual biographies. The latter will be illustrated in the following using the example of the biography of Sigmund Freud.
The biography of Sigmund Freud was published in the 4th issue of the first volume of the ÖBL in 1956.2 The author of the biography is identifiable as the Austrian internist, psychiatrist, neurologist and racial hygienist Karl Johannes Thums (1904–1976) based on the lists of employees and authors 2 [Karl Johannes Thums], Freud, Sigmund. In ÖBL, Vol. 1 (no. 4, 1956), pp. 357–358. published in the introductory part of the lexicon.3 Furthermore, the archive of the ÖBL contains the much more detailed original version of the Freud biography written by Thums.4 This archival source was used in addition to the print version. We will not go into a detailed description of the biography and achievements of Freud, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, here. Rather, our aim is to show how the networks as well as the ideological and scientific socialization of an author determine the narratives present in the biography.
Let us first turn to the published version, which focuses heavily on Freud’s lifework and reveals little in regard to turning points in his life. Related information ends with the year 1889 (Freud’s stay in Nancy) in the text, and there is no mention of any events that had a massive influence on Freud’s life and were connected to the assumption of power by the National Socialists: the burning of his works, deemed as “non-German literature” in Germany (1933), the arrest and interrogation of his daughter Anna Freud by the Gestapo in Vienna (1938), his emigration to London (1938) and the concentration camp internment and murder of four of his sisters by the Nazis (1942–1943).
Looking at the thematic development of
Freudian theory and oeuvre along with their
influence, we once again encounter a shortened and
partly falsified representation. While the article
states that “the teachings of Freudian
psychoanalysis are the foundation of modern depth
psychology and psychotherapy”, conscious
omissions and questionable assertions are also
evident within it. For example, Goethe and
Darwinism are mentioned as providers of impetus
at the beginning of the biography, while Freud’s
reception of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, which
can likewise be classified as important
At this point, we should turn our eyes to
the author of the biography. Thums studied
medicine in Vienna and Berlin before working at
the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and
Demography in Munich from 1933, where he
qualified as a university lecturer in 1939. As a
committed national socialist, he was a member of
the NSDAP and the SA (1931) among others, and
joined the Austrian Legion (Österreichische
Legion), a paramilitary unit set up in the German
Reich to support a German invasion in Austria
Without going into details of the structures of Thums’s network, it can be said that his career path was marked by the fact that his politicalideological and scientific socializations, both at a personal and institutional level, overlapped several times. This becomes particularly clear when filtering the personal–institutional network by institutions. A typological classification of the latter into a) political, military or paramilitary organizations and fraternities, b) ideologically infiltrated research and teaching institutions, c) institutions to be classified as neutral, and d) institutions with which Thums had only indirect contact reveals a predominance of institutions of type b) (see Figure 3).
Thums’s career during the Nazi era and Ernst Klee’s Encyclopedia of People in the Third Reich (2003) make it possible to reconstruct the personal and institutional network of the biographer Thums, who collaborated on several ÖBL volumes. The corresponding entities (persons, institutions) were entered manually into the APIS web application Thums’s narrative about Freud results primarily from this superimposition and less from the fact that the nodes of his network ranged from fraternities to the Supreme SA leadership (OSAF), or from psychiatrist and racial hygienist Ernst 5 http://graphml.graphdrawing.org, (accessed 27.2.2018). 6 https://gephi.org, (accessed 27.2.2018).
Rüdin to Reinhard Heydrich, the chair of the Wannsee Conference – to name but a few.
Thums, as a neurologist and psychiatrist, had the necessary competence, but it is not without a certain absurdity that he was commissioned to write the biography of a psychoanalyst. As a racial hygienist, he was convinced of the need to biologize social ties and relations, and believed in the mathematical predictability of human traits. In contrast, Freud turned to the psyche, and to a kind of language-supported mapping of human experience, thought and behavior. However, if we also take into account the original version of the biography written by Thums, kept in the archive of the ÖBL, we must relativise our statements in so far as, despite the critical tonality that manifests itself in it, the emigration to London is mentioned (p. 1) and the influence of his teaching on “almost all areas of cultural life” (p. 2) is highlighted more clearly. These have apparently fallen victim to editorial cuts. Whether this was done with the author's consent could not be determined. In any case, the example of Freud's biography and its author Karl Johannes Thums clearly shows us how important the source-critical approach is when dealing with biographical texts, especially if one wishes to conduct biographical network research on the basis of the data contained in the lexicon entries.
The next step in the interpretation of biographical
dictionaries is analysis of the networks of the
biographed persons themselves, which can be
reconstructed based on the information contained in
the biographies. Franco Moretti’s witty statement
about “Human beings employed full time in
keeping institutions alive, not vice versa”
The biographical articles in the ÖBL are formally structured. Every entry begins with the name of the person, their professional activities, their dates and places of birth and death, and their religious faith. This is followed by a listing of the person’s direct relatives, i.e. parents, siblings and children. All of this information is available as metadata. The socalled main text of a biography is unstructured text, but essentially follows the order education – career – memberships – awards – honors. The following text is a rough translation of a single biography from German into English. It describes the life and work of artist Alexander Demetrius Goltz, who lived from 1857 to 1944:
As the son of a railway officer, he spent his youth in Rekawinkel and in Vienna, then studied painting at the University of Fine Arts in Munich (1873 to 1874, pupil of Otto Seitz) and Vienna (1875 to 1877, pupil of Anselm Feuerbach). He undertook study trips to France, England, the Orient and America, and in between visited Munich (1884 to 1888), Dachau, Paris and the Bretagne. From 1904 to 1907 he was head of set design at the Burgtheater, and from 1909 to 1910 at the Vienna State Opera. Following Feuerbach, he initially devoted himself to figural painting with historical, often also oriental topics, which he treated with lyrical sentiment and Venetian coloring, as well as the portrait, and then went on to paint landscapes and portraits in light-and-dark contrast.7
The text contains several building blocks, each of which describes one particular step in Goltz’s education, career or life. In addition, it also defines his relations to named entities. Through his work at the Vienna State Opera, for instance, his relation to the institution is stated. This can be annotated using the highlightertool of the APIS web application as shown in Figure 4.
The annotator can choose between several types of relations. For demonstration purposes, four different types of relations have been selected that are frequently used in biographies of artists to describe relations between persons. The networks in Figure 5 show the results and dimensions of different types like “was spouse of”, “was related to”, “was parent of” or “was pupil of”. The last of
1957), p. 29. these four types provides the most promising network structure for analysis. These characteristics should be kept in mind when considering new annotation projects and future network analyses.
Lastly, which type of network a person can
be linked to depends on his or her biography. The
art historians Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz pointed out
that certain metaphorical descriptions in
biographies of artists have been repeated since
antiquity
Place names are another category of entities frequently mentioned in biographies. They are used, for example, to describe study trips to foreign places and countries. Each time a place name is annotated in APIS, a geographical reference is automatically parsed from the matching rdf in the GeoNames database.8 When this data is superimposed on a map, a point cloud as depicted in Figure 6 is formed. It is comparable to the concept of a scatter plot diagram. The size of a circle is determined by additional information like how frequently a place name is mentioned within the selected sample. A specific characteristic of place names is the fact that they differ in regard to their level of detail, i.e. every imaginable type of geographical entity from countries to the smallest villages, or from mountains to excavation sites, can be encountered in biographies.
The main idea behind the corresponding mappings is the wish to gain a better understanding of how migration worked in the past. So far, the study “A Network Framework of Cultural History” (Schich et al., 2014) is the first approach to this topic in the field of the digital humanities. Based on the metadata collected from three different databases (Freebase.com, the General Artist Lexicon and the Getty Union List of Artist Names), the movements of artists were traced over a period of more than 2000 years.
They aim “to explain the impact of local deviations
from the uncovered general patterns” through
quantitative methods and statistics. Critics such as
the historian Malte Rehbein have argued that this is
a simplification of historical realities. From
Rehbein’s point of view, more qualified data
beyond places of birth and death is required to
make valid assumptions concerning the movement
patterns
Jonas Kuhn und André Blessing developed
an approach based on machine learning and
semiautomatic data curation for the ÖBL corpus in 2015
In addition to this aspect of migration, the
term spatial art history is becoming increasingly
important. Scientists in this emerging field of
research emphasize that comprehensive art
historical research needs “to cover many scales
(from global to local), combine monographic and
serial data, and take into account the plurality of
cultural and artistic transfers that occur through
both the creative process as well as its reception, as
exemplified in work on cultural transfers”
If these considerations are taken into account, APIS provides the ideal data resources for new studies in spatial art history. Simultaneously, exemplary case studies are developed within the framework to showcase how this data can be used in practice.
The ÖBL corpus currently consists of
approximately 20,000 biographies in total.
Obviously, the task of annotating all of these
biographies in a historically correct fashion is
daunting at best. Before beginning an annotation
project within APIS, it is therefore essential to
precisely define a research topic. In other words,
the scholar needs to compile a new prosopography.
In the 1970s, when the computer-assisted
humanities were in their infancy, the historian
Lawrence Stone pointed out the danger that
computers might “tempt [us] to abandon sampling
techniques”
There are several possibilities for sampling biographical data, like cohorts based on generations, origin or profession. Within the APIS project, one scholar is focusing on the biographies of artists. Of particular interest are artists who can be linked to the artist association Künstlerhaus as well as to other groups of professionals identifiable as art collectors.
When the data annotated in this context is filtered by the relation “was student of”, the network shown in Figure 7 results. It consists of two types of nodes: institutions and persons. The more connections an institution has, the more often it is mentioned within the biographies. This is also reflected in the depiction and size of the nodes. The most prestigious institution for studying the fine arts from the time of the Habsburg monarchy up to the present day is the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. It is thus not surprising that it is located at the center of this network (see Figure 7).
By transforming the same network into a one-mode network, different research questions can be answered. Figure 8 shows the resulting network. Connections between the nodes of this network represent students who studied at more than one university. In this specific case, the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts is strongly connected to the Vienna Technical University (TU Wien) and its predecessor, the k. k. Polytechnisches Institut Wien, the Kunstgewerbeschule Wien, predecessor of the Vienna University of Applied Arts, and the academies of arts in Munich and Prague. In other words, these educational pathways are very common for artistic careers and the narratives in the ÖBL corpus. Rare examples within this data set are represented by separated nodes at the bottom of the visualization.
In summary, it can be therefore said that both approaches showcase different but complementary approaches and aspects for interpreting biographical networks, and they are equally fruitful for historical studies. In the near future, the development of technical methods and infrastructures will not be the only core requirement. It will be of even greater importance to foster and strengthen this field of research by providing comprehensive historical research on both the networks of biographers as well as those of the persons described in biographical dictionaries.
This paper was devised in the context of the research project “Mapping Historical Networks: Building the Austrian Biographical / Prosopographical Information System (APIS)” funded by the Austrian National Fund for Research, Development and Technology.