Project:Saints/Ireland
Sources
- For saints venerated in/assoc. with Ireland, Ó Riain's Dictionary of Irish saints should be a convenient starting point, along with his CGSH and the ODNB entries on Irish saints. Items for most of these saints are needed for reconciliation with the saints mentioned in the online Monasticon Hibernicum.
- For saints venerated on the continent or in England, Gougaud's Les saints irlandais hors d’Irlande (available for download), another French work of which the name escapes me, and entries in Bibliotheca sanctorum may be consulted as a starting point.
Process
Create a working spreadsheet
- The first step is to create a Google spreadsheet with the basic data required to populate the database. Although there is no need to be comprehensive at this point, we aim at covering at least the rudimentary basics.
- Ó Riain (DIS) will be our starting point. In the same way that PASE is careful about conflating similar persons, we do not need to follow 'Ó Riain's razor' everywhere (and in some cases, treating relatively distinct saints in a single entry may also be the result of not wanting to fragment information in a printed book). A property can still be used to assert that the identity of saint A is potentially related to the identity of saint B (localised, 'ultimately the same as ...', derived from).
@todo - add guidelines
Columns:
- Label - mandatory
- cross-references in DIS may be temporarily marked as two hyphens (--) pending further action. Ultimately, we need to resolve them because cross-references may serve different purposes. It may refer to an alias, a similar saint, or to someone else related to the saint.
- Aliases - recommended
- description -
- first name group -
- name in DIS
- page numbers in DIS
- CODECS ID
- Saints in Scottish placenames ID
- ?Province - undecided, maybe
- ?Associations
- sex or gender - female, male or other
- Feastday -
- Comments - internal working notes. Is there anything we should be aware of? Anything that requires a closer look?
- To consider
- DIB ID (Dictionary of Irish biography)
Prepare in OpenRefine and import data
[...]
Data structure
For an example, see Broccán Clóen of Ros Tuirc.
Label, description, aliases
[...]
Classification
Names
- part of : name group
- First name, patronymic, nickname/epithet, ...
- What about language varieties?
Name group?
Many variations are to be expected due to language varieties, hypocoristic forms, misunderstandings, uncertainties in the sources and other factors. The Saints in Scottish placenames database uses the loose concept of the 'name group', which additionally includes names that are "unrelated linguistically, but they are often confused."
Saints group
In addition to the name group, there is a 'saints group', e.g. 'Brénainn m. Findloga' belongs to 'Brénainn (ns)'. This concept is especially convenient when the name is in evidence but it is difficult to pinpoint any specific saint.
Examples of name-groups include:
- Cóemgen, Cóemán, Mo Chóemóc, Coemi (ns)
- Colum, Colmán, Commán
- Conall, Conual, Conval, Cynfal (ns)
- Findbarr, Bairrfind, Bairre, Uinniau, Finnén etc (ns)
Sex or gender
Lineage or kingroup
- Both assertions made by the sources and scholarly assessments are worth including. Every assertion can be qualified.
- Property not yet available. @todo
Associated places
Because data used from MonHib will create property relationships that point from the ecclesiastical site to the associated saint, it is not (or not yet) necessary to have property relationships pointing in the opposite direction.
The extent to which there are places that are not ecclesiastical sites is relatively small but we may want to return to this later on.
Floruit
Real, supposed or otherwise. We can record date ranges in the EDTF format (https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime).
@todo - simple guidelines, with examples, on the use of EDTF.
Feast days
- Requires the presence of each calendar day in the database. All relevant items, from January 1 to December 31, have been created as instances of Item:Q4192.
- As pointed out by Elva Johnston, it would be good if we were able to associate each assertion with a source (or provenance), for instance to note that a particular feast-day is recorded in the Martyrology of Donegal only.
- Could be expanded by associating each assertion with an ID that uniquely identifies the corresponding passage in a TEI XML edition of a particular martyrology.
References
- Property : Property:P95 (Has reference)
- Linked to :
- Ó Riain, Dictionary of Irish saints (Item:Q4596)
- etc.
External identifiers
- Saints in Scottish placenames ID - https://saintsplaces.gla.ac.uk/
- CODECS ID - page ID of the subject on CODECS. This overview, while not guaranteed to be complete, can be helpful: https://codecs.vanhamel.nl/Show:Lab/Wikibase/Saints
- Wikidata ID
- DIB ID - hopefully many of the IDs can be retrieved through Wikidata, but Wikidata is unlikely to be complete.
See also
Sample query
PREFIX : <https://codecs.wikibase.cloud/entity/>
PREFIX t: <https://codecs.wikibase.cloud/prop/direct/>
PREFIX wikibase: <http://wikiba.se/ontology#>
PREFIX bd: <http://www.bigdata.com/rdf#>
PREFIX wdt: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/>
SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel ?Wikidata_Item_ID ?CODECS_ID WHERE {
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE]". }
?item t:P94 :Q4572.
OPTIONAL { ?item t:P14 ?CODECS_ID. }
OPTIONAL { ?item t:P5 ?Wikidata_Item_ID. }
}
ORDER BY (?itemLabel)
LIMIT 100