Project description
Uncovering the details of Europe's medieval history
Europe's medieval history is rich with various religious and inquisitorial cultures. Understanding these cultures will help us gain a better picture of how European culture in general was shaped through the ages. Typically, the history of these cultures is told through case studies and sociohistorical analysis that can often omit important details. The EU-funded DISSINET project seeks to provide an unprecedented understanding of dissident religious and inquisitorial cultures in medieval Europe. It will do this through detailed computational analysis of how these cultures were formed and recorded. The goal is to uncover details hidden in how human interaction can shape a broader social environment, and shed light on Europe's medieval past.
Objective
The DISSINET project will provide an unprecedented, “networked” understanding of dissident religious and inquisitorial cultures in medieval Europe through a vast computational analysis of the social, spatial, and textual relationships by which they were formed and recorded. Rather than treating these cultures through narrative case-study or traditional social-historical analysis, our approach will build upwards from the microscopic details of human interactivity towards a broader social picture. Historiographical impressions of the social grounding and spread of religious dissidence, the specifics of dissident cultures as well as their shared characteristics, and the confrontation between inquisitors and suspects will thus be challenged from a previously inaccessible perspective. To achieve this goal, we will manually collect data on every aspect of dissident and inquisitorial interactivity from inquisition records that cover thousands of individuals from the 13th to the 16th centuries. The resulting database will be large-scale and yet retain every nuance of our sources. Our data model will allow us to employ cutting-edge computational techniques, well-adapted to uncover hitherto undetected and historically significant patterns: these methods will include social network analysis, geographic information science, and computational text analysis. In its broader implications, the project will open up a significant new dimension in the conversation between history and the social sciences. It will offer the former a novel approach to challenging historical material, and the latter pre-modern perspectives on the bottom-up emergence of larger social phenomena such as covert networks, repression, and shared religious culture. Finally, DISSINET will make a significant contribution to the digital humanities, providing a powerful digital toolkit for research into multifaceted human phenomena that retains and makes use of the complexities of textual sources.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
601 77 Brno
Czechia