By Diana Tran
In May 2024, we started with Daniel Feldman’s and Arla Hoxha’s event types as a basis to categorize events into ten different types, as shown below:
- Mission (External)
- Petition (Internal)
- Campaign
- Phenomenon
- Birth/Death
- Office (previously titled Succession)
- Dispute
- Celebration
- Commentary
- Construction
In Summer 2025, Churchill Couch and Tess Usher worked with Principal Investigator Jesse Torgerson to update the event types. From the original ten event types, they have added an eleventh and updated certain event types to ensure higher accuracy. The new event type categorizations are as follows:
- Travel/Embassy, replacing Mission’s purpose
- Petition being split into Meeting and Assembly/Council
According to Professor Jesse Torgerson, here are the definitions of the new event types:
- Travel / Embassy: Ultimately this is about tracking the movement and exchanges between those who run political collectives – kings, popes, emperors, etc.. “Travel” here is only being noted not because there is movement implied in the action, but because the action IS movement. E.g., the King going to Worms is in and of itself an event worth noting. Berengar (e.g.) going to Worms is not an event in and of itself (rare exception: a nobleman such as Berengar is ACTING like a King, i.e., putting together a rebellion), but rather will be part of another action such as a Campaign
- Meeting: Here the event action is characterized by subjects of the text getting together for the purpose of exchanging something, or making some kind of communication. Examples include people bringing a petition to the King, or the king asking a nobleman to come to court for something not particularly negative. One issue to pursue / keep thinking about. Currently, when one side in a campaign comes to meet with the other side and negotiate something (e.g., terms of surrender) we have tagged this as a Meeting.
Meeting is meant to encapsulate all meetings within the chronicles. These meetings don’t necessarily need to be antagonistic, but need to have two or more Persons involved. Professor Torgerson does acknowledge a possible conflict in interest in the example he gave for Meeting could be counted as Embassy because of the meeting between two warring factions (political collectives) as a result of a campaign
Lastly,
- Assembly/Council: The event action is defined typically by the word ‘assembly’ or ‘council’ within the event itself. It is typically an official meeting organized by an official, such as a king, emperor, or a papal leader.
Petition was deleted in favor of Assembly/Council and Meeting for the sake of more specificity in our categorization. The move to create Assembly/Council is a callback to Daniel Feldman’s tag general assembly. This time, we’ve broadened the scope of this tag to include council meetings as well (based on context) and the specific keyword ‘assembly’ is a common indicator to use this tag.
A change we’ve made is that one passage can be tagged with two event types by splitting the passage into two events and tagging both events with the relevant event type.
Thus, the new event types are:
- Birth/Death
- Office/Succession
- Celebration
- Construction
- Travel/Embassy
- Meeting
- Assembly/Council
- Campaign
- Phenomenon
- Commentary
- Dispute
We are hopeful that this will be our final iteration of the event type categorizations, however, if major issues appear as we continue to utilize this methodology in Fall 2025, we will revisit it.