Itineraries, Gazetteers, and Roads – a newsletter article

At the end of last year, I wrote a short article for the Newsletter of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies.  The article talks about our ongoing itinerary project, focusing both on some of the itineraries I have been working on in Spain, but also talks about the broader collaboration between Wesleyan, Marlboro, and Illinois State that has produced the data.  There are also a few visualizations comparing Roman and Early Modern road use by the royal entourage in the thirteenth century in the Crown of Aragon.  It’s available Here at the ASPHS website – the edition is Volume 9 (2018).

 

Adam Franklin-Lyons

One example from the newsletter of short trips taken by king Jaume II around Valencia showing his use of newly constructed road systems instead of older Roman routes.

Lab Meeting: Jan 28, 12pm

Welcome back to the Spring 2019 Semester!

Our first (informational and organizational) meeting for the year will be Monday January 28 at 12-1pm in USDAN 110.

Lunch will be provided!

We will be discussing ongoing projects, ongoing needs, specific semester plans, and how those semester-specific plans fit into the larger trajectory of the Lab.

Anti-Jewish Riots and Royal Communication Networks in Aragon

Royal Communication Networks in Aragon During Anti-Jewish Riots : 1391-1392

by Kaitlyn Thomas-Franz

Introduction

This past semester I had the opportunity to work with Professor Franklin Lyons on an exploratory data analysis project relating to a series of anti-Jewish riots that occurred in the crowns of Castile and Aragon between 1391 and 1392.  The initial intent for the project was to gather as much information as possible for each city where a riots were recorded as having taken place, generating a relative timeline of events relating to the riots for each of the cities.

Method

Starting our data collection by focusing of the territory of Aragon, I performed a close reading of both Benjamin Gampel’s book Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response and Abigail Agresta’s article on the riots that occurred in the city of Valencia, “‘Unfortunate Jews’ and Urban Ugliness: Crafting a Narrative of the 1391 Assault on the Jueria of Valencia.”  Noting each line of text where a date was given for a particular event, I recorded each of these incidents on an Excel spreadsheet.  I also tagged each events using the following categories:

riot_1391
legal_pre
legal_post
violence_post
violence_pre
communication
travel_royal_official
travel_king
and
travel_city_representative.

The first label notes the date or dates when rioting occurred in a city.  The “legal” labels refer to judicial actions that occurred either before or after the riots, including legal actions against Jewish communities and the arrest/execution of rioters.  In connection, the “protection” label refers to any official decrees specifying the protection of the Jewish community of a city independent of judicial punishments.  The “violence” labels note events of violence committed either against the Jews or against a city that are distinct from the riots themselves while the “communication” label notes letters sent between royal and city officials.  Finally, the “travel” labels note the movement of royal and city officials across cities.

Network Analysis: Preliminary Network

When I finished my preliminary timelines of events for Aragon, however, I noticed that  the majority of the information about the events was derived from letters written between royal and city officials.  Thus, Professor Franklin Lyons and I decided to narrow to scope of the project for the time being to a network analysis of the communication webs to see what sort of information could be gathered about the institutional response to the riots in relation to different groups’ geographical jurisdictions.  In all, the network I generated is comprised of 291 letters from King Joan (the ruler of Aragon), Queen Iolant (his wife), and other Royal and City Officials, with a main focus on communications being between July 1391 and April 1392, which is the month in which major rioting ceased in Aragon.  Using Gephi, I generated a preliminary network that I then color-coded based on its modularity centrality, the number of distinct clusters within the broader network.  As seen below, the network is comprised of three distinct communications groups: King Joan, Queen Iolant, and Duke Marti and Duchess Maria (Joan’s brother and his sister-in-law).

Networks: Duke Marti and Duchess Maria

Curious as to how the sub-networks of each of these royal figures connected to their respective jurisdictions, I generated a series of maps in R that reflect the different regions to which King Joan, Queen Iolant, Duke Marti and Duchess Maria sent communications and noted the content of each geographically-based link.  Below I have feature examples of the networks I created for Duke Marti and his wife.

 

 

 

 

 

Image: Map of Duke Marti’s communications network

Present in Valencia when riots occurred in the city in July, Duke Marti remains there for the remainder of the year.  As the crown prince, Marti had direct responsibility for the city, which is a potential reason why there are so few communications from King Joan to the city during the first month following the rioting.  Marti was also the first duke of Montblanc, which explains his communications with a city far from his purview during the rioting activity.  Nonetheless, the network also highlights that Duke Marti maintained extensive communications with both his brother and his wife, thereby suggesting a more unified royal reaction to the rioting occurring in the city.

 

 

 

 

Image: Map of Duchess Maria’s communications network

While the duchess resided in Tarrega, Catalonia for much of 1391, she maintained consistent communications with cities in the northern section of Aragon.  Because her father was the lord of Luna and the other two regions were under the jurisdiction of her husband, her contact with those cities is evidence of her use of family networks as a means of both relaying information about the riots to those cities as well as attempting to prevent rioting in those regions.  Furthermore, this network demonstrates that Maria shared equal responsibility with her husband in the operation of their jurisdiction, acting as his political representative when he was occupied by the rioting in Valencia.

Conclusion

This project was a valuable introduction to the Traveler’s Lab, allowing me to learn how to use both R and Gephi to generate intricate communication networks.  In the future, I hope to continue with this project by expanding the number of featured communications as the majority are from King Joan and other royal officials as opposed to city officials.  Furthermore, I hope to gather additional sources in order to develop similar event timelines and communications networks for the rioting activity in the crown of Castile.

Lab Meeting: December 10, 2018

The Traveler’s Lab end-of-semester meeting for Fall 2018 took place on Tuesday December 10, 12-2pm in Allbritton 304.

We heard from Kaitlyn Thomas-Franz (working with Prof. Franklin-Lyons on Royal Communication Networks in Aragon During the Anti-Jewish Riots of 1391-1392, from Prof. Gary Shaw (below) with an update on his project to map monastic houses and hostels as a hospitality network in late medieval England, and from Nate Krieger, Yuen Sun, and Ezra Kohn about their work on mapping the geographic references and key actors in the ninth-century Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor.

Lab Meeting: October 12, 2018

On Friday October 12 the lab met 2.30-4pm, in Allbritton 004, for a University-funded visit from Prof. Kathryn Jasper.

Dr. Jasper’s visit highlighted the lab’s commitment this year to increasing multi-campus collaborations. This semester Traveler’s Lab students working with Prof. Franklin-Lyons and Prof. Torgerson teamed up with Prof. Jasper’s students at Illinois State University to share resources, projects, and best practices.

This is the first opportunity we have taken to work so closely with students who are not at Wesleyan University or Marlboro College, and so Prof. Jasper’s visit allows us to look at how well the collaborations are going, to confirm plans for finishing the semester, and to learn more about her own research project.

Prof. Jasper shared from her own research using analytical & visualization tools (especially ArcGIS) for historical research into how the “monastic network” of one reform-minded eleventh-century monk with a more than healthy dose of ambition — Peter Damian — came into being and continued to function in practice.

Lab Meeting: September 25, 2018

Our second meeting of Fall 2018 took place Tuesday Sept 25, from 11.50-1.10p in Allbritton 004.

Prof. Pavel Oleinikov presented a workshop on Extracting Place Names from a Text using a bit of R coding. This was an exciting opportunity for all of us to start actively sharing methodologies. It was quite an adventure in getting a number of us with little no coding experience to try our hand!

Image: Prof. Oleinikov breaks down the logic of his named entity recognition code.

Lab Meeting: April 26, 2018

Our end-of-the-semester (Spring 2018) lab gathering was held over lunch at noon in Allbritton 304.

At that session, we heard a bit of what the lab’s been doing—especially from the pilot ‘Roads of the Middle Ages’ project—and from our guest Professor Emilia Jamroziak of Leeds University who talked briefly at lunch on the topic,
Working with Networks Regionally and Comparatively: How to Do it Safely and Sensibly.”

Image from Prof. Jamroziak’s lecture on April 25, also attended by lab members.

Constantinople as Palimpsest: Now with Words!

Update February 2021: We have published an updated citeable version of Constantinople as Palimpsest on BodoArXiv here.

Our beta-version of the Constantinople as Palimpsest (a modest encyclopedia of Byzantium) has now had a few issues corrected and has been updated.

Introductory essays now explain each of the different categories of analysis that were generated by the Traveler’s Lab researchers and students of COL 128 in Spring of 2017: Monumental Architecture; Water Infrastructure; Exchange Economy; Administrative Regions; Religious Life (Christian); and, Private Life.

A new introduction to the website as a whole has also been added, and I copy that here. Enjoy! Explore!

 

Welcome to Constantinople as Palimpsest

This is an in-progress place-based encyclopedia of Byzantium.

The goal of this web-based encyclopedia is to present to the public—in a layered, interactive format—what interdisciplinary scholars of Byzantine Studies have uncovered about the medieval life of the city of Constantinople (or Byzantium).

Please scroll down to read about the goals of this project, and how to use the resource, even as we continue to develop it. Much more will be coming in the Spring of 2019!

 

What is a Place-Based Encyclopedia? And, Why?

Please read about the ongoing development of this encyclopedia here. Our goal is to make it possible to explore the current historical image of Constantinople in the way that it lives in the minds of Byzantinists — the academics who study this city and its empire.

The traditional heading-based encyclopedia is not a helpful introductory tool. Traditional encyclopedias (even digital versions such as Wikipedia) require the reader to already know something—often quite a bit—about what they are looking for. Furthermore, even advanced scholars who use traditional encyclopedias will tread the same trails over and over again, turning to entries on subjects they know rather than reading ecumenically to discover what they do not. Maps are much easier ways to orient oneself (quite literally!) to an unfamiliar field of study, and they are dynamic means to re-conceptualize information that is already known via other formats.

 

How would I use the Encyclopedia?

The students behind Constantinople as Palimpsest have taken the most up-to-date scholarly historical map of Constantinople, and added clickable over-drawings to it, as GREEN lines, points, and polygons. The result can serve the entire possible range of readers equally well.

Persons with no knowledge of Byzantium at all can “walk” the imagined medieval city by simply working through our curated, manipulable maps (see the tabs above): zoom in and out, drag the map across their screens, and click on items that look interesting. Size is a fair guide to introductory-level importance. By clicking on the largest items on the map to the right, (Monumental Architecture) one will discover the main routes in the city, its walls and harbors, the Hippodrome and major Fora. This provides a good orientation to the layout of the City, and a context for working through the smaller items expressed as green “pins”–statues, columns, fountains, gates, etc.

Experts in Byzantium may explore what they already know in a new form. Ordering artefacts by historical location rather than historical narrative, disciplinary focus, or alphabetical order opens up a field in which alternate associations and ideas can germinate. Historians, scholars of Literature, Art Historians, and Archaeologists will–as the map continues to be more fully populated–be reminded of neglected or underappreciated material. Finally, the nature of the medium makes it possible to (once an editorial team is formed) update discoveries and incorporate new analyses into the encyclopedia in real time.

 

How do I read the Encyclopedia’s places?

Each line, point, or polygon on the map may be clicked to activate a small pop-up window (note: pins or points respond to being clicked at their base rather than on the sphere at the top of the post). These pop-up windows contain a description and images (where possible or relevant) of the site or item in question. In each entry the item is briefly defined and dated, followed by a fuller commentary, and then a bibliography of relevant images and sources.

Each item is catalogued: by its name, by the nature of our knowledge of it in the present, and by its date.

First, there are four categories for item “type”.
These are:

Region—neighborhood, geographic area, etc.
Site—forum, harbor, palace, etc.
Monument—obelisk, church, etc.
Object—statue, lamp, hairpin, etc.

Then, there are three categories for nature of survival.
These are:

In Place (IP)—intact/visible; object never been moved
Displaced (DP)—survives but moved or only traces remain
Textually Attested (TA)—completely gone, but texts attest

Thus, the label on the item opened on the right

Monument IP_Column of Constantine_330

tells the reader that this is a surviving Monument that is still In Place and so can be seen (at least mostly intact) in-person today, and is identified as the Column of Constantine raised in the year 330.

Please contact Jesse W. Torgerson with questions or feedback.

Turning Geographic References into Maps with Recogito: Part 2 (of 2)

By Caroline Diemer (Wesleyan ’18) (introductory note by Jesse W. Torgerson)

This blog post is the second part of a description of our work to see what the “geographic references” that we generated from the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor using MAXQDA looked like when projected onto maps. This is in fact the seventh in a series devoted to the project “Geography and Narrative in the Chronicle of Theophanes.” Previous posts considered, in order: “place” in history; “place” in narrative; how we divided our text; how we coded “geography” in our text; how we organized those codes. Our immediately previous post (please read that first!) from November 2017 discussed the initial steps we took to map the geography of the Chronicle using the free online platform Recogito.

It should be noted that the present blog post is already several months out of date. Currently we are re-working the maps that Ms. Diemer displays here with some of the new features that are now available on Recogito. We are also updating and adding to these maps with more complete geographic date from the Chronicle (we are now only a few months away from having completely indexed the work’s geography).

What to tag as a “geographic reference” in making a Recogito map?

Just as we have described in our previous posts on tagging with MAXQDA, we faced the same nuances here in determining how to capture the many ways in which geographic references manifest themselves in the Chronicle. In making our maps we worked with the same distinction of “explicit” and “indirect” references.

Nevertheless, as will be clear, there are some unique nuances to Recogito’s mapping capabilities that means, in the end, the maps it generates do not coincide exactly with the hierarchies of geographic terms derived in MAXQDA.

1. Tagging Explicit Geographic references in Recogito

To give an example of how I would tag or create such an item consider the sentence example cited in the previous post:

AM 5796

Diocletian lived privately in his own city at Salon in Dalmatia while Maximamus Herculius lived in Lykaonia

To create a map for this sample sentence we would tag the explicit geographic references: Salon (in Dalmatia), Dalmatia, and Lykaonia. Lykaonia and Salon would appear as dots (as cities) while Dalmatia would be a polygon (as a region).

Most of the time, people who are directly associated with geographies (i.e. are from [X place], live in [X place], hold a position at [X place]) would be tagged.

Thus, in this sentence, Lykaonia, Salon, and Dalmatia would be tagged but Diolcetian would not. Readers might recall from our post on MAXQDA that in that program we did tag Diocletian. That was because we use the MAXQDA data differently, for instance to also ask questions of textual proximity.

But in the Recogito side of the project, we are only interested in seeing the actual geography, so we did not to tag Emperors because emperors are, in general, not tied to their city in ways that say a bishop would be.

2. Tagging Indirect Geographic References in Recogito

Not all, or even most of the geographic references in the Chronicle are as clear and straightforward as tagging explicit references.

Some of these are indirect references such as “the city” or “that river.” Geographies like these require reading the surrounding sentences to determine exactly which geographical feature is being referred to. This type of tagging also requires that the tagger go through individually, rather than allowing the program to tag all mentions of “the city” or “that river” because often times that phrase is used to describe different places. It is because of our interest in these sorts of references that we have not been able to use text analysis programs alone to “tag” our document, but have had to also “tag” the entire Chronicle by hand.

One question that is raised with indirect geographic references is whether or not direct references like Constantinople, should be weighed more than indirect references.

It has been our practice to tag the indirect references just as if the text had states the place itself.  “Salon”, “Dalmatia”, and  “that city” each have equal weight in the geographic references.

3. Tagging Vague Geographies in Recogito

Vague or unspecific geographic references also pose some problems

Consider two sentences from one entry (this sentence is also used as an example in a previous post).

AM 5885

In this year the pious emperor Theodosius fought bravely against Eugenios as the passes to the Alps, and, after capturing him alive, executed him,… The most Christian emperor … ordering that bishops from the East should come to Rome for this, among whom was sent Akakios of Beroia.

Some of the limitations of Recogito means that we do not run into some of the problems we would anticipate.

Take the line “Passes to the Alps” in the above sentence. It is both an incredibly specific and incredibly vague statement, which should make it incredibly difficult to know how to map “accurately.” That is, from a mapping standpoint: should I tag the entirety of the Alps or just the passes? If just the passes, which passes?

This would be a major issue if Recogito could be that specific, but at the moment it cannot and this takes this decision out of our hands. At the moment Recogito uses is Map Tiles imported from Pelagios. These do not have region tags for landmarks / geographical features. This means that for the moment the decision of how to tag places such as “the Alps” has been taken out of our hands. This is only a temporary relief, for in the future, when we begin to export and manipulate these maps in a program like ArcGIS, we will have to make decisions about such geographic features as these.

A related issue is when features do have a referent, but are not depicted in the way one might desire. One obvious example of this is the “Nile River.” The great river does not appear as a region, or as a line (as we might hope), but as a singular “dot.” Similarly, we have had to rely on “dots” to stand in for regions. The most notable version of this problem is Persia or the Sasanian Empire, for which there is no tag, due to the fact that no one has yet made a region tag in Pelagios for this area. Persia is a place mentioned quite often in the Chronicle. As a placeholder I used Ctesiphon as the place tag for Persia, because it was the capital during the Sasanian Empire. It should be noted that Ctesiphon the city is actually only mentioned once in the entirety of the Chronographia.

Red Arrow points to the point that represents the Nile. Purple Arrow points to the point which represents the Persian empire

To return to the example of the entry for AM 5885, we can illustrate another difficulty. “Rome” and “Akakios of Beroia” are easy to tag but “Bishops of the East” is much more challenging. In our minds, this is most certainly a geographic reference, but one that is even broader than “the Alps.” What does “the East” exactly mean to the reader? Where does the East start and stop? Should the East be the entirety of the Eastern Mediterranean and Persia? Even if we wanted to express something like that, Recogito does not have such a general region tag. Because there are no other options I annotate “the East” by simply marking it as “Flagged.” This means the word has been tagged but there is no correlating point on the map.

I often run across geographies within the Chronicle, which have points or regions but Recogito does not recognize the spelling or name. This is often due to the fact that there was a misspelling, or the fact that the Pelagios Map Tile does not list a version of a name as being from a particular place.

For example, Skythopolis is a Roman town in the Levant which comes up semi-regularly. Bet She’an is the official name of the site at the moment, and it is the name that Recogito has listed, so when I tag Skythopolis Recogito tells me that there are no towns of that name. From the tagging page I must look up Bet She’an to tag the reference correctly.

To deal with geographies like this, we have kept a running list of all the geographies that have to be tagged with its modern or alternative place name. At this point, this list is about 7 pages long, and so it is not an insignificant issue.

The second type of vague reference is when we don’t know where a specific city, feature, or monument is. In cases like these I have to utilize the flagging option (already mentioned above).  At the moment there are 134 geographic references flagged. There are a couple reasons why there are geographies that need to be flagged. The first is that there are no tags in Recogito, nor are there any modern towns which have evolved from the Byzantine town, which I could tag.

However, sometimes the need to “flag” a reference is due to the name of a place being the same as somewhere much more important. For example: Avroleva is a town or possibly mountain somewhere in Bulgaria. I am not exactly sure where. The reason I know that much about Avroleva is because there is a glacial mountain range in Antartica which is named after Avroleva, Bulgaria. Searching for any information on Avroleva the town is quite difficult to near impossible because all of the results are about Avroleva the glacial range.

A final example of uncharitable geographies in the Chronicle is towns whose only documentation of existence is the Chronicle itself. Take for example “John of Kyrestai.” We do not know where Kyrestai is because that is the only mention of the place, and the mention does not even give us a general idea of where it could be.

These flagged towns will forever be a mystery.

Conclusions

These two posts on our use of Recogito are simply preliminary documentation of our process and ongoing questions. Over the course of this Summer 2018 we will be using Recogito to craft some carefully edited maps for portions of the Chronicle. These will take advantage of some of Recogito’s new tools for analysis, such as color-coding based on item “type.” Look for a blog post in August 2018 on the results of these efforts.