Viewing an Author Profile

Included in eHRAF Archaeology is biographical metadata about the more than eight thousand anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, sociologists, linguists, indigenous writers, museums, universities, and other individuals and institutions who produced the documents that make up the database. Most of these contributors were authors, but some of them translated various documents into English for HRAF.

The biographical data for authors is accessible from the publication information pages for documents. Simply click the author’s name in the byline for the document to view the author profile in the sidebar.

Included Data

Biographical data available for authors and other contributors include the following possible fields for individuals:

Wikipedia Summary
Entry in Encyclopædia Britannica
Gender or Sex
Born
Birth Place
Died
Death Place
Country
Website
Language
Occupation
Profession
Employer
Work Place
Field of Activity
Educated at
Country of Education
Archives at
CV Url

And these fields for institutions:

Wikipedia Summary
Entry in Encyclopædia Britannica
Inception
Country
Website
Organization Type
Parent Organization
Disestablished
Area of Operation
Start and end dates

Note that not all authors have data for all of these fields.

Data Sources

The biographical information was gathered from these national libraries:

Library of Congress
German National Library
French National Library
National Library and Archives of Québec
Danish Bibliographic Centre
National Library of Latvia
National Library of Poland
National Library of Korea

Additionally, we have data from Wikidata, a resource of open data that is part of the Wikimedia Foundation.

This has been possible through the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), a joint project of several national libraries maintained by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). VIAF harvests bibliographic data about authors, works, and other subjects from national libraries (as well as Wikidata) into a central resource.

How the database was created

Starting in 2023, Ben Ostermeier, a member of the software engineering team at HRAF, developed this resource by associating each HRAF author with a VIAF record. With his background in library science, Ben validated each author against a VIAF record to ensure they were describing the same individual. He then wrote a script to automatically gather the metadata for each author from VIAF and some of the national libraries it connects to.

Ben first used a script with the VIAF search API to locate VIAF records for each name in the database. He then used a variety of techniques to verify the thousands of writers in the database:

A script to compare the titles of works in HRAF against those in VIAF. If a HRAF title were among the writer’s works on VIAF, then the writer was verified.
A script to compare the dates in author names in HRAF and VIAF, if available, such as with the anthropologist Firth, Raymond, 1901-2002. If the year of birth and year of death matched, the writer was verified.
A script to check for the name of a culture or tradition the HRAF author wrote about in the titles of VIAF documents. For example, if the writer wrote about the Nuer and “Nuer” was present in the titles on VIAF for a writer, then the writer was verified
Manually checking the remaining authors between HRAF and VIAF. In many cases, this meant comparing whatever information we had about a writer in the HRAF document and seeing if it matched the data available through VIAF. If a writer was clearly an an anthropologist but the VIAF record was for a musician or politician with no anthropology experience, then the match was clearly incorrect and thus deleted.

About Gender and Sex Terminology

While HRAF acknowledges the difference between sex and gender, we use the term “Gender or Sex” for the name of the field. This terms is inclusive of the variety of terminology used in national libraries, particularly since some libraries use non-English terminology which may have different connotations.

Library or Resource	Term Used
VIAF	Gender
Library of Congress	Gender
German National Library	Geschlecht (gender or sex)
French National Library	Genre (gender)
National Library and Archives of Québec	Gender
Danish Bibliographic Centre	Sex (uses ISO/IEC 5218, which explicitly states the scope does not cover gender identities)
National Library of Latvia	Gender
National Library of Korea	Gender
Wikidata	Sex or gender

Limitations

Unfortunately, not all HRAF authors are in VIAF’s database, meaning we do not have data available for every author, and some authors in VIAF have limited information available. However, the majority of HRAF authors are verified with a VIAF record. Currently, of the 8,547 authors in eHRAF databases, 6,581 (77%) of them are verified with a VIAF record.

While Ben is confident that nearly every verified author is associated with the correct VIAF record, we are not the creators of the data about authors and thus cannot verify their veracity.

Here are some notable limitations of the national library authority files Ben has noticed from working with the data:

While it is unclear how widespread this practice is, in some cases library catalogers have evidently assumed an individual’s gender based on their given name, sometimes incorrectly. For example, the German National Library previously listed the gender of Christy G. Turner, an anthropology professor at Arizona State University, as female, even though various primary sources, such as his obituary, used he/him/his pronouns. The cataloger at the German National Library likely assumed his gender because the name “Christy” is often (but not always) a feminine name instead of conducting their own research. Ben was able to get this corrected at the German National Library by contacting them and ensuring that Turner’s Wikidata entry had the gender properly recorded as Male and citing Turner’s obituary as the source for the data. There may be other writers in the HRAF authors database, particularly less well known ones, that may still have incorrect genders recorded at various national libraries.
Some national libraries and VIAF itself do not handle trans and non-binary gender identities properly. For example, VIAF only uses three possible gender values: “a” (meaning female), “b” (meaning male), and “u” (meaning unknown or other), with many trans people having their gender represented as “u”. For example, Elliot Page, an actor who came out as a trans man in 2020, has the gender “u” in VIAF. Wikidata usually handles trans identities much better, as it allows a wide spectrum of possible values for its “Sex or Gender” field, such as the “trans male” value it uses for Elliot Page.
VIAF and libraries will sometimes conflate multiple individuals with the same name as one person. Thankfully, Wikidata has a mechanism to report such issues, and VIAF typically fixes these reported issues once a month.
In general, library catalogers have limited resources to conduct independent research on all of the writers they create authority files for. Thus, for more obscure writers, there may be very little information available.

Please be sure to verify any details about an author with an authoritative source, and please also let us know if you see any errors! We may be able to get an error corrected. The best way to let us know is to email us at hraf-support@yale.edu.