News

19 Sep

Did inquisitors fear charges of sexual misconduct?

Why did inquisitors interrogate women in different spaces than they did men? DISSINET looks into this in the most important history magazine worldwide, History Today.

19 Jul

Mapping Waldensian “synagogues”

DISSINET has published a map of Waldensian gathering places in Piedmont.

23 Jun

A new historian and a computational sociologist have joined the DISSINET team

The DISSINET has welcomed two new team members over recent months following the departure of a historian and a sociologist in autumn 2022.

InkVisitor website launched

The official website of InkVisitor, a state-of-the-art environment for the collection of complex data from texts developed in the Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET) at Masaryk University, is now launched.

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.