Current Project Team: Arla Hoxha (Project Manager), Zaray Dewan, Diana Tran, Tess Usher,
Project Creators: Daniel Feldman & Arla Hoxha
The Comparing Early Medieval Chronicles project began as the Annals of Fulda project.
The goal of the project was to perform a quantitative-qualitative analysis of the chronicle Annals of Fulda through the platform Nodegoat. It has produced a fully-fledged database of chronicle entries, people, places and events.
The conceptual model we have used to map events is a novelty in the field of chronicle-studying, and one we hope will continue to be replicated and improved upon.
We hope our database will aid scholars reflecting on this time period or thinking about questions of narrative and the anatomy of the chronicle; why are they put together in a certain way?
2023-2024
The first steps were to enrich the conceptual model and data and refine our processes. Following the footsteps of previous projects in the Lab, even though we started Fulda from zero, our goals were realised by the end of the summer of 2024.
The obvious, and maybe the most important achievement was the database itself, with the chronicle fully uploaded to Nodegoat. Anyone with access to the database can find, categorise and visualise elements of the chronicle, such as the people or places in it. The chronicle entries are tagged by which chronicle and manuscript they belong to and the text is fully mapped with object tags. This makes it easy to analyse the chronicle based on the elements that interest a researcher. Through the Nodegoat configuration, it is possible to see the way all the data is linked to each other; what events take place where, who is involved, how many times a name is referenced in a chronicle entry, comparisons between multiple entries or events, and more.
A great feature of the database is the link to ancient locations through Pleiades. All events have a location tag which allows us to visualise the events in a geographical map. Interconnectivity is one of the best things about this model because not only do we have data on different places and events but we know what happened where and who was involved.
Creating a model for determining events that allows us to follow the logic of the narrative was an important achievement this summer. The process involved much trial and error and remains a work in progress, but we were able to refine the bulk of the process, as explained in the last article. In creating the event objects for the database we made sure to use the text’s language as well as date the events based on the sequence of the narrative rather than historical time (although a descriptor was provided for this, in case a specific date was present in the text). All this was done to shift the focus towards the narrative and follow the logic of the chronicle and what the text deems important, as opposed to our reading of it. We hope this model will inspire and allow for more thorough analysis, that leaves less room for misinterpretation.
In a future ambition for expanding the project, we hope to use the comparative tools provided by Nodegoat and the construction of the model to run comparisons between different manuscripts as well as the english and latin versions of the text. Onboarding a scholar of Latin to work with the team is an aspiration which would further enrich the Fulda project.
As stated before, we hope to expand our model to include data from other Carolingian chronicles, such as The Royal Frankish Annals. Even further we hope to inspire other scholars to use quantitative methods, especially those that centre the narrative, in their research of chronicles from all time periods.
Although much progress was made during this summer, there is always room for improvement. In the upcoming semester, we anticipate fixing our problem with accessing locations not covered by the Pleiades ancient locations database through an API. We also hope to find ways to automate as much of the text-tagging process as possible. Some of this has already been done, through the Reconciliation system in Nodegoat, but we wish to refine the process further. The use of AI shows big promise in this regard, as was discovered during an experimental session of using OpenAI to perform people text tagging. Implementing and integrating this process into the nodegoat object tagging is one of our goals for the future.
2024-2025
In this year the Annals of Fulda project became a fully comparative project, and so the project title changed to Comparing Early Medieval Chronicles. As the academic year closes we will provide a full update.