At the Fall 2020 meeting of the New England Historical Association, held virtually, members of the lab provided the papers for a panel called, “Traveling in the Middle Ages: Using Digital Methods and Spatial Analysis for Historical Research.” Chaired by Ella Howard of the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, it was notable for featuring a co-written paper by Wesleyan and Lab alumnus Connor Cobb ’18 as well as three other lab members. The papers were “Women at the Common Law: Travel and Gender in Thirteenth-Century English Courts”
by Gary Shaw and Connor Cobb, Wesleyan University, “The Camino de Santiago: Student Researchers and Creating a Database for Spatial Analysis,” by Sean Perrone of Saint Anselm College, who organized the panel and is in fact the President of the New England Historical Association, and “Medieval Travel as a Big Data Problem,” by Adam Franklin-Lyons, who is now notably based at Emerson College in Boston. All told, the session exemplified the lab’s collaborative character, the goal of integrating students (and former students) into our work, and our interest in combining innovation in pedagogy, interest in the theoretical and methodological challenges of such work, and an ongoing commitment to classical historical scholarship.
