HIST 516 Digital Approaches to Medieval History
This is a lab-based course combining lecture and discussion with hands-on computer work using digital tools and methods to explore historical questions from the medieval period. Our class will examine a digital reproduction of a 13th-century chronicle of Pisa, Italy, now housed at the British Library. Currently, we have images of the entire chronicle, but the text is only partially transcribed. Our goal during the semester will be to make sense of the chronicle in its historical context, to manipulate the images with the digital tools at our disposal, to examine what the source can tell us textually and formally, to collaboratively construct an argument based on the digital resources at our disposal, and to communicate that argument in a digital class project. Some of the digital tools we will introduce include Scalar, Google Sheets, Recogito, FromThePage, Voyant, Palladio, JSTimeline, and OpenRefine.