The Traveler’s Lab Blog – Methods, Analysis, Interpretation

Lab Meeting: April 26, 2018

by

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!

by

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

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.

Constantinople as Palimpsest: Now Live!

by

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

Constantinople as Palimpsest is an interactive, space-based encyclopedia of Byzantine Constantinople. It was created by Prof. Jesse Torgerson and his Wesleyan undergraduate students as part of their regular coursework, integrated with the Traveler’s Lab, and supported by its student researchers. It is our first sustained Traveler’s Lab project that fully blends the ongoing work of students in the lab with a stand alone, one-semester course.

To create this project, we took advantage of a project-based pedagogy (on which, see below) and had students “unearth” (through good old library research) what they could discover of current knowledge of the material realities of the capital of the medieval Roman Empire, Constantinople (modern Istanbul). Students uploaded their research projects onto Esri’s ArcGIS online platform, then curated and organized the cumulative collaborative database via StoryMaps.

Click the image below to explore the interactive digital encyclopedia . Since the site remains in its “beta” version, scroll down for an explanation of how to “read” the content in the database, and to learn about the process of its creation.

On this map, as above, we currently we have curated over 300 distinct items into six overlapping “themes” — Monumental Architecture, Water Infrastructure, Exchange Economy, Religious Life, Private Life, and Administrative Regions.

These themes present scholars’ current knowledge of the topography of medieval Constantinople. Each pin, line, or polygon in the database (everything that is green) can be clicked to activate a “popup” dialogue box. Each dialogue box contains a brief encyclopedia entry on that item (whether it is an item, a monument, a site, a region, or a route), which gives a short definition of the item, its date, some commentary, and then further bibliography and image citations. The content in these boxes represents a student’s self-designed research project, which that student (cited as the entry’s author) generated as their coursework for a single week of the semester. These are the surviving traces of Constantinople, as “unearthed” by students.

Constantinople as Palimpsest: an experiment in Project-Based Learning

Constantinople as Palimpsest represents our first attempt to fully link the Traveler’s Lab researchers and the digital humanities acumen of the Traveler’s Lab students with a traditional course (where students are ultimately responsible for acquiring mastery of specific content, as determined by the Professor). The Project-Based Learning model — sustained at Wesleyan by a Davis Foundation grant won by Prof. Lisa Dierker, and supported by Paula Blue and Dan Mercier at Wesleyan’s Center for Pedagogical Innovation — provided the conceptual framework for this pedagogical approach.

The Constantinople as Palimpsest project has thus far undergone two course-based incarnations. It was initiated by the twenty students in Jesse W. Torgerson’s Spring 2015 course, Re-imagining East and West: Constantinople between Rome and Istanbul.
Then in Spring 2017, a second group of fifteen students — supported by two student researchers in the Traveler’s Lab (Connor Cobb (Wes ’16) and Nadja Shannon-Dabek (Wes ’17)) — took up the project as their coursework for Constantinople: From Rome to Istanbul (COL 128).
A third version of the course, scheduled for Spring 2019, will further develop the project.

From the Acquisition of Historical Knowledge, to the Making of History

The screenshot below gives a sense of what the initial 2015 version of the project looked like. In part this image simply shows how far we were able to develop the aesthetics of the project (partly by making our basemap a geo-referenced version of Konstantinos (Kostas) Plakidas’ publication to Wikimedia commons of his synthesis of R. Janin’s Constantinople Byzantine).

But, more significantly, this image shows in nuce why our different approach to history is so significant. Project-based thinking is not just a different way of running course assignments, but a different way of doing history. Participants in the course collaborated on our GIS-based database to “plot” scholars’ current knowledge of the topography of medieval Constantinople. Thus, students did not experience “history” as a passive appreciation of past things, but came to understand and gain real ownership over the remnants of this lost world through active research. They learned the topography of our historical knowledge of Constantinople by actually generating that topography.

How does this sort of work actually change students’ relationship to history? In the above screenshot, each point represents a specific known material object, preserved today as either a textual or physical artefact. The dispersal of these known items is not democratic. It is not “of the people.” Instead, it is concentrated along the imperial processional route, the mese. Students quickly came to see — in a much more profound way than simply hearing their professor repeat the point from the lectern — how and why our understanding of the Byzantine period is so dominated by imperial narratives and monuments. The markers on this map cluster at (from left to right) the Forum of Theodosius I (r. 379-392), the Forum of Constantine (r. 312-337), the Hippodrome, the Baths of Zeuxippus, and the cathedral church of Hagia Sophia. The persistence of this dominance of the imperial narrative over the surviving source material was only more deeply re-iterated with the additional material added in Spring 2017, as can be seen by perusing our “Monumental Architecture” theme. To uncover a “people’s history” requires intentional and difficult work.

The database both reveals this bias, and makes it possible to work against it. Students pursued this work with enthusiasm. Our 2017 themes “Private Life,” “Water Infrastructure,” and “Exchange Economy” are all attempts to bring non-imperial experiences to life. Students also fought against this bias by creating their own historical narratives and artistic responses to Constantinople, based on the imagined geography of our database.

A number of these analytical projects were created as Story Maps. For instance, one such Story Map (by Elena Milin, Wes ’18) explored what it might have been like to be swept up in the way a famous, prolonged urban revolt against the Emperor Justinian I (d. 565) — the Nika Riots — as the crowds, imperial troops, and raging fires would have moved through the monumental environment. Thus, besides simply using the opportunity to generate new voices and perspectives, many of these student spin-off projects built out from the new theoretical perspectives opened up by the project’s emphasis on creating a sense of space and place in history.

Theodosian Kathisma

The project continues to pursue two long-term goals:

(1) equip Wesleyan students to manage and curate the only all-inclusive database on medieval Constantinople

(2) facilitate Wesleyan students’ collaborations with professors and students at other institutions in pursuit of space-based analyses of medieval Constantinople, both as it might have been, and as it has come down to us in the present

Turning Geographic References into Maps with Recogito: Part 1(of 2)

by

By Caroline Diemer

Note: This is the sixth in a series devoted to the project “Narrative and Geography in the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor”.
First post (“place” in history) here; second (“place” in narrative) here; third (how we divided our text) here; fourth (how we coded “geography” in our text) here; fifth (how we organized those codes) here. 

This blog post will follow very closely the “geographic references” that we have implemented in MaxQDA (as discussed in the previous blog post).

With the easily accessible, incredibly detailed and accurate maps constantly available to us in our daily lives, we must always keep in mind that we do not have the same mental visualizations of the physical world as would those we study in the past (for this project specifically, ninth-century Byzantines).

When reading such geographic reference-rich texts as the Chronographia, it is hard to understand the world that is being constructed for the contemporary (ninth-century) reader. This is due in part to the disjunct created by our own reliance on visualizing the world as maps, but also to our unfamiliarity with the names and connotations specific places would have had for a ninth-century Constantinopolitan.

Our tool of choice: Recogito

To understand the geography of the Chronographia, we are using Recogito, a program which visualizes, or actualizes, written geographies that can cause the modern reader confusion. Why was Recogito the right source for our purposes?

Recogito is an initiative of the Pelagios commons, a text annotation tool for creating maps by turning “tags” of geographic references in a text into either points or polygons (the program’s way of representing a region) on a geographic projection.

The placement of the points, as well as the shape of the polygons, come from Pelagios Map Tiles. Recogito collects its place data from the community-built and rigorously edited online gazetteer Pleiades, as well as the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire (DARE). As such it not only has the virtues of being online and open access, but is also backed up by the most up-to-date and rigorous geography of the ancient and late antique world available.

Recogito works to put texts in direct conversation with all of this geographic data.

For instance, Recogito has a function for tagging/annotating all references in a text. For example, when I tag Constantinople, I am given the opportunity to tag all the mentions of Constantinople in the text I am working with.

After I have finished my tagging, Recogito will generate a map that represents points as circles. A point with many tags will be larger than a point with very few (though there is a small standard size, so depending on the range of the distribution of points, points with a few tags may be the same size as one with only 1 tag).

When you click on one of these circles (or “points”) Recogito shows you all the different terms from the text that we have located at that geographic point. This is especially important for our project as this feature allows us to see who is mentioned in association with a specific place. That is, many of our geographic tags are what we have called “implicit geography” – such as bishops who are tagged with the city of their see.

Clicking on a point also displays a portion of the specific passage that point comes from (and if multiple passages, how many), as well as the number of tags for a place.

Both of these features help to show what has determined the nature of the site’s role for this section of the text. Such as: Is Alexandria, as a city, mentioned a lot or are there a lot of people from Alexandria doing things?

The Process

  1. Splitting up the Chronographia into the different emperors

We split up the Chronographia into individual text documents for the reigns of each emperor. We did this first because it is an extremely long document.

But second (and most important for our analytical questions), dividing by emperor allows us to compare the differences between emperors. We are interested in seeing what types of geographies appeared with each emperor. Where are the geographies of concern? Is there one place mentioned more than the others? Is each particular reign more region-based or city-based (as we found when comparing Diocletian to Constantine)? What people groups or regions did the Chronographia consider to be of greatest concern under each emperor?

  1. Uploading the Documents, and Recogito’s self tagging

Recogito has a feature whereby, when you upload a document to the program you can allow it to automatically tag any place it can recognize. In theory this would be an incredibly helpful feature, considering about 25% of the things I tag in Recogito are well-known places. As already stated, Recogito draws place-names from several platforms, not just from Pelagios map tiles, but DARE (Digital Atlas of the Roman empire) and Modern Geonames. It seems that with the automatic tagging feature, however, Recogito currently does not use Pelagios and DARE but only Geonames, or at least prioritizes this database. This is a problem because there are many places around the world which share names. One example of this is Antioch. Syrian Antioch is an often mentioned city in Recogito because it is one of the bishops that is included in the rubrics. But instead of tagging ancient Antioch, Recogito automatically tags the Antioch in southern California, half a world away from where we needed it.

This is what happens when Recogito autotags all of the Chronographia

This problem arose with the majority of the automatic tags. Because Recogito does not have any way to mass edit tags, I would have to go through and fix each tag individually. So instead of letting Recogito try to automatically tag places for us, we had to start with a clean slate. This required us to unclick the automatic annotation button during the uploading process.

  1. With and Without Rubrics comparison

Besides comparing the narratives of different emperors’ reigns to each other within the Chronographia, we are also ultimately interested in comparing two versions of the Chronographia. The main difference between the “geography” of the two versions of the text is quite significant, more so than one would guess as the bulk of the text of the Chronographia is exactly the same in both.

The one version – that which is familiar to historians of Byzantium as the version in all the critical editions and translations – has what we call “dating rubrics,” which are not red-lettered headings, but a list at the beginning of each new entry with the current emperor, the emperor of Persia, and the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and then Antioch.

The other version of the Chronographia (preserved in the ninth-century manuscript Paris BnF Grec 1731) lacks this rubricated system of dividing up each entry.

Since our interest is in studying geographical mentions or references in the Chronography, the difference between these two is significant as the one version initiates each entry with this “dating rubric” rote-mentioning seven places, whereas the other version has none of these.

Thus far, all of the Chronographia with rubrics has been mapped in Recogito. A selected number without rubrics has also been mapped. At this mid-way stage of our project, comparing the two versions allows us to already see exactly what a difference these references make in the geographic “pictures” created in the two versions of the text. The difference is immediately apparent, and quite visually striking:

The Geography of the Reign of Constantine I according to the Chronographia (305-335):
(left) with dating rubrics, (right) without dating rubrics

This is, however, preliminary and is merely a preview of some of the analyses we will use Recogito to perform on the narrative of the Chronographia.

In our second post on Recogito, we will describe some of the procedures and problem solving techniques we have developed in order to use this tool to map our text in a manner aligned with our research questions and agendas.

Lab Meeting: December 7, 2017

by

A busy Fall Semester for the Traveler’s Lab ended with a group meeting on Thursday December 7.

Fourteen Wesleyan students joined Profs. Birkett (Exeter, UK), Franklin-Lyons (Marlboro), Koscak (Wake Forest), Oleinikov (Wesleyan), Shaw (Wesleyan), Torgerson (Wesleyan). We were also joined, via video-conference, by our potential collaborators at Laffayette College, Prof. R. Goshgarian, Dr. J. Simms, and J. Clark.

We heard presentations on:

We can now also announce our visiting colleague, Prof. Stephanie Koscak’s project for Spring 2018: Lost and Stolen Objects in 18th-century London. Next semester at Wesleyan and Marlboro will also see continued work on the Chronicle of Theophanes, the Datini Archive, the Friars’ settlements, and turning more itineraries into roads in Late Medieval England.

Finally, we bid a “see you soon” to our collaborator Prof. Helen Birkett who will be returning to Exeter University after a semester of working with the Traveler’s Lab. We look forward to turning this semester’s work into a consistent shared workflow and further tangible collaborations as Prof. Birkett pioneers the Traveler’s Lab “Network.”

Some images from the presentations:

Still in process, here is the “communication network” generated thus far from Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus (or Exempla)

After 18 months of data generation, the very first bits of data analysis from the Chronicle of Theophanes:

Mapping the Communication Network of the Datini Company

by

[This project had significant technical assistance from Pavel Oleinikov at Wesleyan University and Logan Davis, Marlboro class of 2017.]

I have been working with the Datini metadata and letter collection for about a year, but have had more ideas and questions rather than actual analyses and observations.  Just this semester, often in discussions with students I have started to hit on productive lines of analysis within the data.  At the Social Science History Association’s annual meeting in Montreal (Nov. 2-5, 2017), I presented a few preliminary observations – the charts and notes below are all taken from the talk.  First off, if you are not familiar with the Datini company’s letters, the project description includes a short introduction with a number of links to the archive itself and some further readings.

What is a “Normal” Travel Time?

One of the persistent difficulties with medieval travel and communication derives from the fact that baselines are very hard to create.  “Normal” travel, even along short distances, was highly irregular.  Moderate trips could take days or weeks depending on weather, brigands, political difficulties, or any number of other delays.  In Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean, he described this as a continuing feature even after 1500: “The essential point to note here is this very variety, the wide range of times taken to travel the same journey: it is a structural feature of the century.” (Braudel, 360).  One of the best advantages of the large body of letters in the Datini collection is that it allows for broad generalizations about travel time and what we might count as “normal” communication.

Attempting to create a sense of average travel times, I selected a series of city pairs that have a relatively high volume of communication – generally at least 500 letters.  This allowed for the errors and vicissitudes present in the data (letters with impossible travel times – both too short and too long, negative travel times, journeys that were simply unexpected, etc.) to be outweighed by useful data, making generalizations possible.  I first noticed that the graphs of travel times between cities tended to have either a relatively tight set of times with a clear center or a messier, more irregular set of times.  The graphs below are two good examples of each type: the trip between Barcelona and Valencia (≈350km), in which the vast majority of trips took six or seven days; some took five or eight, but many of the trips that fell outside this narrow window probably involved some form of delay or even an error in documentation.  On the other hand, the trip between Palma de Mallorca and Florence had large numbers of letters taking anywhere from thirty to forty-five days.  The trip was somewhat longer (≈1000km), but significantly less reliable.

Measuring Reliability with Standard Deviation

My first thought was that this might simply be a product of distance.  To test this, I needed a generalized measure of multiple comparable trips.  Using the standard deviation gave a rough number of days within which the majority of the trips occurred: a higher standard deviation means a less reliable journey (for the above examples, Barcelona/Valencia has a standard deviation of just over 4, Palma/Florence is over 12 – so far so good).  I then produced a map of all of the high-frequency travel routes (this came out to roughly a dozen examples with 500-1000 letters, another dozen from 1000-2000 and a final dozen from 2000-5000).  I color coded the routes by high, medium, and low reliability (green is a standard deviation under 5, blue is 5-10, red is over 10.)

While distance seems to play a role, the larger distinction appears to be between land and sea routes: land routes are on the whole more reliable and present much less variability (a lower standard deviation) than any route which required a ship.  In some respects, this is difficult to measure, because many journeys (Valencia to Marseille, Pisa to Genoa, etc.) could be accomplished either on ship or on land.  However, it is quite notable that trips that require a ship (all communication with Palma de Mallorca, for example) routinely have a higher standard deviation than equivalent or even longer-distance trips accomplished on land.  This map also confirms one of Federigo Melis’s own earlier arguments: that Datini’s representatives largely separated the sending of information from the sending of goods.  Even the long trip from Bruges to Barcelona happened almost entirely over land, meaning the information the couriers carried was worth the cost of a completely separate trip unconnected to the Italian galleys routinely sent around Spain to the low countries and England for wool.

Graphing Specific Travel Routes

To get a better sense of what the standard deviation was telling me about these various trips, I chose a representative set of cities to graph all of their trips over time – a more granular visualization than the full map.  This would indicate both if there was any change in the speed and method of travel over time, but also provide a different way to visualize the reliability of land travel.  The following three graphs show the travel times of all known letters sent from Barcelona to Valencia, from Bruges to Barcelona, and from Palma de Mallorca to Florence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Previous research has already confirmed that Barcelona to Valencia is certainly land based: it is fast, highly consistent, and has a strong “floor” to the speed, meaning that most trips not only happened quickly, but that the trips took close to the minimum possible amount of time.  Palma to Florence – necessarily a sea trip – has no clear floor and only a hazy average time.  No two sea trips are alike and the average is a good bit higher than the possible fastest trips.  Finally, the graph of travel from Bruges to Barcelona cements the clear impression that most communication came by land.  The graph has a strong floor with a fairly narrow band of travel times, similar to the shape of the Barcelona toValencia graph.  The graphs also indicate that the travel times of each journey stayed relatively consistent over the (relatively short – 1370-1415) time period of the Datini letters – so nothing notable to report there.

And finally: Speed…sort of

The last visualization I created attempts to get a sense of speed along these many routes.  Measuring time is straight forward enough: I used the median travel time for each route.  Distance, however, is an entirely different problem.  For land routes: did people travel the shortest distance all the time?  Surely they did not travel as the crow flies.  Did they travel more likely through known cities even if the route was longer?  Were there portions of river travel interspersed with travel on foot?  For trips in the Mediterranean: it is impossible to know if they followed the coastline or sailed across open seas.  Did the ship stop at any intermediary ports to take on supplies?  Did this add two or three days to the trip that could change our estimation of the speed of travel?  Difficulties abound – most of which medievalists are quite aware of.

Despite these questions, I estimated rough distances between all of the cities, taking into consideration whether I thought the trip was on foot or on ship (in part derived from the standard deviation score compared with the distance.)  The results demonstrate that travelers on foot were not only more reliable, but generally faster than messages sent on ship.  While there are surely extraordinary voyages where a ship manages a very high speed, in the aggregate of thousands of journeys they are routinely slower than land based travel.  Additionally, even across long distances (again, note Bruges to Barcelona), the travel times imply a fast clip (40km+ per day) over many days.  There are a few outliers on the map likely caused by two cities at a distance apart that represents a tipping point.  ie: if location A is 50 kilometers from location B, it’s highly possible that many letters are recorded as taking two days – a speed of 25 kilometers per day (quite slow.)  However, it is just as likely that the courier traveled at 40 kilometers per day and arrived early on the morning of the second day – a fact which is almost never recorded in the documents.  These problems get smoothed out at longer distances, so the outliers tend to be on short routes.

Moving Forward

The most notable commentary to come from the conference is that I neglected to investigate the role of seasonality – Mediterranean shipping is notoriously seasonal because of prevailing winds and winter storms.  The data initially suggests there is less seasonality than expected, but I do not have very solid analyses yet.  A couple of brief looks at the data suggest that the different travel in summer and winter did not influence land-based travel, but did slow down ocean going travel.  A further question follows from the seasonality question: if ship travel slowed down significantly in the winter, did this influence the number of letters sent in winter?  Did certain routes that could use either ships or land lean towards land in the winter in response to harder ocean crossings?  If we split the summer and winter trips of an ocean going voyage apart and graph them separately, do two clearer time bands emerge?

Beyond this specific question, there are a couple other ways to move forward.  The first is to figure out a better way to model and illustrate or visualize the structure of the datini communication.  This will probably involve breaking the usual planimetric accuracy of many thematic maps and creating some form of topological map (think the London Tube map) or cartogram that makes routes more important than the angles and structures of the coastline.  And second, I hope to more thoroughly review Melis’ work on communication in the Datini company and begin to get a sense of who was actually doing the work of moving information around – a prosopography of messengers, if you will.  The mercantile communication of the Datini company will make a compelling comparison to the urban and royal communication systems (which are much less studied than Datini) that make up the “Couriers in the Crown of Aragon” project at the Travelers Lab.

Exploring Institutional Structures and Individual Networks

by

by Helen Birkett

I’ve been in residence at the Traveler’s Lab this semester and have taken the opportunity to work with Wesleyan students to extend my study of Caesarius of Heisterbach’s social network. The results, so far, are promising…

Background

My project uses the Dialogue on Miracles by Caesarius of Heisterbach (c.1180-c.1240) as a case study for investigating the structure of Cistercian social networks c.1200. Caesarius was a monk at the Cistercian abbey of Heisterbach in Germany and my project examines the social interactions recorded in his most famous work, the Dialogue on Miracles, which was written in the late 1210s and early 1220s. I started this project as a way of exploring the possibilities of network analysis and to test out a hypothesis that underlay my work on interactions between Cistercians in Britain at around the same time.

The Cistercian order developed a particularly extensive and regular system of communication between its abbeys. This was partly the result of the way in which the order expanded: new houses were founded by a group of monks setting out from one community, the mother house, to begin another, a daughter house. This meant that the Cistercian order was structured like a family tree in which each community could trace its relationship back to Cîteaux, the founding house, through lines of filiation. Importantly, the Cistercians used these relationships to maintain discipline and uniformity in the order: each year the abbots attended an annual general chapter at Cîteaux; and each year the abbot of a mother house was required to visit each of the abbey’s daughter houses.

My research investigates how this structure functioned as a communication network for the transmission of miracle stories. Although sparse and sporadic, my British source material was already suggesting that this structure was less important in the transmission of stories than I had anticipated. The Dialogue on Miracles, a large work of 746 chapters in 12 books or 805 stories, provided a much bigger dataset with which to test these ideas. It also gave me the chance to compare new digital approaches with the more traditional analytic techniques employed by Brian Patrick McGuire in his classic study of Caesarius’ social network.

Research Questions

I began research on this project a couple of years ago in collaboration with Pádraig Mac Carron, a physicist and network analysis expert at the University of Oxford. The project is based on two main research questions:

  1. How useful is network analysis for understanding the transmission of exempla in the Dialogue on Miracles?
  2. To what extent does Caesarius’ communication network correspond to Cistercian lines of filiation?

The first question is the more explorative, fun one – it really asked, can I use network analysis to look at this material? The initial response to this was… kind of. I created a database of interactions that recorded Caesarius’ sources for his stories, which Pádraig converted into a visualization. However, the resulting ‘network’ was limited and artificial – as might have been expected from the nature of the sample, it was almost entirely based on Caesarius. The addition of the few stories which had a provenance not directly linked to Caesarius (i.e. he doesn’t tell us how he heard them) did little to complicate the picture (these are the red dashed lines below).

Visualization of Caesarius’ sources (Pádraig Mac Carron)

The second question engaged with this data in a more sophisticated way and provided some more promising insights. My research showed that while some of the interactions in Caesarius’ text followed expected lines of filiation, a surprising number of interactions jumped between filiations.

Caesarius at the Lab

My collaboration with the Traveler’s Lab is allowing me to pursue these questions further. Two Lab members, Rachel Chung and Rebecca Greenberg, are working with me to create an extended dataset that records the interactions within the stories themselves. Our aim is to use this new, extended dataset to complicate Caesarius’ network – to use interactions in the more fictionalised narratives of the text to offer a more realistic picture of the Dialogue’s social world (it’s a conceit that appeals strongly to my literary side!). This extended dataset should also offer further insights into the question of Cistercian communication structures vs social reality.

This new dataset includes only direct interactions between identifiable individuals. This means it excludes implied relationships (such as familial relationships) unless the two individuals talk, write to each other, or interact directly in some way. This does create an element of artificiality in the data, but it also means we focus on who is actually talking to whom rather than expected interactions. We’re also only listing identifiable individuals to make sure that we can merge these datasets and networks successfully. As a result, I’ve had to refine my original dataset for Caesarius’ sources, which included a lot of anonymous individuals and the potential for double-counting.

Visualization of interactions within the Dialogue of Miracles (Elizaveta Kravchenko)

Currently, we are a third of the way through the data and the results are promising. This visualization, produced by another Lab member, Liza Kravchenko, shows the integrated networks of Caesarius’ sources (black), the additional external sources for his stories (blue), and the interactions within the stories themselves (pink). The nature of the material means that Caesarius will always dominate this network, but this visualization suggests that something more complex and realistic is starting to emerge.

Further Research

As usual, creating one dataset prompts you to think about creating another to offer a fuller or slightly different analysis of the material. Here it’s become clear that a dataset of family networks within the text would be a useful way of investigating individual and institutional connections, and something that should be integrated into the social network of the Dialogue. We could also extend our dataset to include interactions with divine beings, although I remain unconvinced of the value of doing this. Finally, my attendance at the Social Science History Association Conference in Montreal last weekend drew my attention to other ways of visualising textual data, which might be used to make simple, but effective points, about the geographical or thematic biases of my material. These visualizations were based on qualitative data analysis (QDA), which is pretty easy if you have clear search terms but, if not, will be a much more labour-intensive process – and I need to give more thought as to whether the effort involved here is really worth the result.

Traveler’s Lab papers from SSHA (Montreal): Lab Meeting Nov 9, 2017

by

On Thursday November 9, 2017 we resumed our regular meetings in Allbritton 304, 11.50-1.10.

We heard, and then discussed, condensed versions of Prof. Shaw, Birkett, and Franklin-Lyons’ papers from the SSHA conference in Montreal the previous weekend (panel schedule and titles to the right –>).

Celebrating the success and hard work of the lab team that these papers represent — including an update to Prof. Franklin-Lyons’ paper that incorporated seasonality — we discussed connections between the projects’ methods and conclusions, and we considered new objectives, questions, and methods for moving forward with each.

(below) Prof. Shaw demonstrates the surprisingly consistent centrality of Franciscan, Augustinian, and Austin annual meeting locations.

 

 

 

 

 

SSHA in Montreal: November 5

by

The Traveler’s Lab hosted its own panel — “Mapping Communication in Late Medieval Europe” — as part of the Historical Geography and GIS strand at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association conference (held this year in Montreal).

Our papers (below) featured (and credited!) student work done in the Traveler’s Lab over the last several years by student researchers Logan Davis (Marlboro ’17), Stephanie Ling (Wes ’16), Connor Cobb (Wes ’18), Elliott Williams (Wes ’18), Elizaveta Kravchenko (Wes ’19), Rachel Chung (Wes ’18), Rebecca Greenberg (Wes ’19), Ilana Newman (’18), and Maia Reumann-Moore (Wes ’19). We are also all indebted to the ongoing collaborative help from our colleague Prof. Pavel Oleinikov.

In her formal  response to the papers, Ann McCants (MIT, history) expressed the significance of the fact that our model for pursuing rigorous and innovative historical research with undergraduates needs to be pursued and expanded as a model for the field.
Commentators urged us to use our methods to bore down into questions that medieval history has traditionally had a very hard time pursuing, such as non-elite travelers and quantifying the impact of the seasons on movement.
Prof. Shaw’s paper even elicited a live-tweet from Prof. Leo Lucassen, director of the International Institute of Social History at Leiden University.

Above: The Traveler’s Lab team (l-r: Jesse W. Torgerson, Helen Birkett, Gary Shaw, Adam Franklin-Lyons) responds to questions from the audience.

Below:
(left) Adam Franklin-Lyons walks through how he has been able to use the data from the 14/15th-century Datini Archive to establish expected travel times between cities.
(right) Helen Birkett shows how paying careful attention to the transmission of stories in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s 13th-century Dialogue of Miracles is beginning to allow her to see a real social network start to emerge from this collection of narratives.

 

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: John Clark (Lafayette College) & J.W. Torgerson