It is Fall 2024 and the Travelers Lab is BACK in full swing.
On October 10th Alex Williams presented on the CDER project as a part of the Quantitative Analysis Center’s lunch series Data Insights: Student Speaker Series with Turning Messy Historical Datasets into a Relational Database: the Constantinople Project. Constantinopolitana: Database of East Rome (CDER) is a second-generation (first gen here) Travelers Lab project to create a space-based digital encyclopedia of the capital of the medieval East Roman Empire, Constantinople. In preparation for an NEH Grant Proposal, Alex Williams is reuniting two idiosyncratic databases on the nearly hundred thousand named historical persons from this era with one of the main sources for those persons. Those sources are indexed in a (now-digital) catalogue of the tens of thousands of lead seals they used to certify the traces of these individuals’historical documentary work in the (literal) Byzantine bureaucracy. Williams shared her methodology, initial results, and discussed plans for additional linked data and possibilities now open for future research.
On October 18th, surrounded by the aromas of delicious sandwiches (for those who could make it in-person), the Travelers Lab heard from Truman Burden and Gabriella (Gabi) DeKoven. These two new lab members presented along with Prof. Gary Shaw on their new project, Business Trips in and from Late Medieval England. Using (and deducing) records of trips from the not-so-famous (e.g. King John’s houndskeep and game master; Eleanor of Acquitaine’s jester; the Wardens of Merton College, Oxford) to the famous (e.g., Margery Kempe or Christina Markyate) this group is starting a project to track regular trips in (especially) the 13th and 14th centuries. While the methodology and research questions are only just starting to come into focus, the potential contributions of this project for grounding a Database of Medieval Movement are already quite motivating. This project (with contributions from Emmett Gardner) will be the subject of a formal presentation at the New England Historical Association 2024 annual conference at Suffolk University (Boston, MA) on October 26th: “The Medieval Business Trip: Mapping Mobility, Making Society.”
Keep at eye on this space for more formal updates from both of these projects!