FactGrid:Career Statements

Kupferstich "Der Buchhändler" aus: Abbildung der gemein-nützlichen Haupt-Stände von Christoph Weigel (Regensburg, 1698).

Problem and Solution

Historical sources are to a vast extent equipped with statements about the social status, the personal situation, the occupations or the fields of work of people they are listing. Subscription lists, address books, tax lists — they will all offer names, geographical localisations and career statements from "widow of a silk merchant", to "colonel" of the local regiment.

The information is often merely given to identify a particular person but sheds light on far more: you can speak about the social composition of an audience or organisation with a look at the individual statements. The problem is here that you will need a good deal of pre-processing to understand the information you have been gathering: If you have 1,000 names and 300 different career statements you will need a pattern to bring the 300 statements into a dozen of broader categories in order to offer basic statistics of the social structure or of changes in this social composition.

The breakdown information relies on a process of entity recognition and a system that divides the field into more or less homogeneous groups. The solution is a system that already knows your statements, that has various names an individual profession can have and an ontology that allows you to bring your statements into interesting categorisations.

This is basically what we are trying to do with the information you are connecting on individuals wit the help of Property:P165 "Career statements".

FactGrid career statements — three granularities

FactGrid is presently operating with about 8,800 "Career statements"

• All FactGrid Career statements

Some of these are broad lie "pensioner", some are as succinct as "baker" or "court master baker" and some are used to collect a line of successors like: "rector/president of the University of Erfurt", wich is a sub-category of just as university rector. These are the three categories from broadly applicable down to the individual level:

• Item:Q37073 Career statement (baker, master baker, court baker, university rector, widow, pensioner)
• Item:Q37131 Career statement with historical or geographical specifications
• Item:Q257052 Career statement that captures a sequence of incumbents "rector/president of the University of Erfurt"

All the statements are interconnected through (P3) "sub property of" statements, so that you can easily ask for all university directors, although several of them are running under far more specific statements. Search for with the wdt:P165/wdt:P3* switch to get the succinct statements in the respective wider field.

• sample search: All university rectors/ presidents on FactGrid

Connected to the OhdAB ontology

• FactGrid:OhdAB-Datenbank OhdAB project space

All our "career statements" are connected to Katrin Moellers ontology of career statements OhdAB. The OhdAB has some 45,000 items in a distinct hierarchy of differentiations: this is the German default link and an English translation query

• https://kurzelinks.de/OhdAB German (original version)
• http://tinyurl.com/ylkfblre English (complex translation to be used with a grain of salt)

OhdAB items begin with the OhdAB number code and are a sphere of their own (contact Katrin Moeller and her working group on their project page) - yet we are connecting all our career statements into the OhdAB classification so that we can run, for instance, statistics on the OhdAB ontology:

• The members of Frankfurt's Unions-Lodge, occupations bubble chart the make shift FactGrid system on Property:P626
• The members of Frankfurt's Unions-Lodge, occupations bubble chart the same statistical analysis on the OhdAB-01 level.

The OhdAB matching is not yet finished, but we will get this done in the first weeks of 2024. The OhdAB translation is another project. The German labelling is the source labelling, other language labels are welcome. We offer an English version with a good deal of DeepL translations - this is not yet perfect.

We can run several ontologies and various statistical breakdowns side by side

Th OhdAB ontology is eventually just one way to arrange the various statements with an interest to see a greater pattern. We can run various such systems side by side, they usually will not need more than one or two Properties to generate a hierarchy of ever broader fields on which they locate the objects. We are here just at the beginning. What we need is the individual breakdown l like a division of

• career requirements — from vocational training to doctoral degree in medicine
• admission procedures — how do you get a certain position? do you inherit the position, are you elected into it, do you buy the charge?
• social power — how many people will you have under your command?
• hierarchy level — what next position(s) can you reach from the present position in your career?
• organisational power how is your group or profession organised? By a guild, a trade union, an umbrella organisation?

Careers are far more than just occupations that will be filled with work - they give access to networks, they provide power (or make you poor and helpless), they provide status and prestige, and here we need help to put the various statements on the individual statements which have created and will continue to create. The more we know about the career statements, the easier it is to isolate professions that require the same answers on questions like the ones asked so far.

Contact us if you feel you could make sense of particular profession you are handling in your research, help us to create the properties and answers you will need in order to make use of the work we have done so far.

If you create career statements

1. Use the career statements we already have wherever applicable.
2. If you need new statements: Create them with a P2 statement of Item:Q37073 / Item:Q37131 or Item:Q257052 and connect them to the OhdAB ontology with a Property:P1007 statement.
3. If you do not find the proper OhdAB match - contact the OhdAB team to create the perfect match of a pragmatic regular statement and a OhdAB systematic identification.