News

22 May

Map of Early Heresy cases in the West, c.1000-c.1150

The interactive map application presents dataset of early cases of heresy in the West, ca. 1000–1150, compiled from original Latin sources. It shows locations, heresy cases linked to those locations, and mentions in the sources, on which the description is based. 

21 Apr

Mapping the Latin of medieval inquisition records: DISSINET’s lexico-semantic network as a language resource

As an important product of DISSINET analytical work, there is a specialised language resource for Latin on the horizon. The aim is to enrich the description of the medieval Latin language and improve the quality of computational analysis performed on Latin sources.

20 Dec 2022

Can artificial intelligence read medieval inquisition records?

ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI, has taken the Internet by storm and has generated quite a fuss also in the DISSINET team. First impressions of ChatGPT’s reaction to medieval Latin texts are astonishing.

12 Dec 2022

Data on witchcraft trials in the Czech lands published online

More on persons, places, charges, punishments, and material substances can be found in the the most comprehensive digital dataset of witchcraft trials in the Czech lands completed by Eva Brhelová, Veronika Praženková, Anna Bílková, Anna and David Zbíral.

2 Dec 2022

Reapproaching inquisition records

David Zbíral & Robert L. J. Shaw have published the most up-to-date summary of the rich debate on the uses of medieval inquisition records. In a last, substantial section, the article explains the core of DISSINET's research agenda.

4 Oct 2022

DISSINET Digital Humanities approach presented in a podcast

David Zbíral was invited to a podcast by the Centre of Early Medieval Studies to talk about digital humanities approch in the research of medieval dissident communities.

3 Oct 2022

Early Christian Baptisteries online

The most up-to-date geocoded dataset of 1,100+ Christian buildings from 3rd-12th century created with participation of DISSINET project now available online.

Structured data vs. contextual complexity of texts: An unnecessary dilemma?

David Zbíral and Robert Shaw briefly introduce the Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling (CASTEMO), an approach to the human-controlled and data-driven transformation of texts to richly structured data, which was developed within DISSINET modelling of historical textual sources.

1 Jan 2022

The DISSINET team is now complete!

We are delighted to announce that, after two highly competitive hiring processes, DISSINET has gained two new members: Gideon Kotzé (computational linguist) and Larissa de Freitas Lyth (historian)

23 Dec 2021

Modelling German Waldensians’ social networks – thoughts of an associate researcher

BLOG: Reima Välimäki short report on researching Stettin Waldensians social networks and about his experience with the DISSINET data model.

1 Sep 2021

The new DISSINET team is up and running!

On 1 September 2021, the ERC Consolidator Grant-funded project “Networks of Dissent: Computational Modelling of Dissident and Inquisitorial Cultures in Medieval Europe” (DISSINET, 2021-2026) officially gets underway! The team is now constituted. Who’s aboard?

15 Aug 2021

Model the source first! Towards source modelling and source criticism 2.0

The project of computational historiography needs not only to adopt the modelling for representing the target phenomena but also to achieve a complex representation of the textual sources and its interpretive layers. To do the latter, we have developed an approach that we call “source modelling”.