12 Feb Gender patterns in medieval heresy incriminations Examining an extensive register of inquisition from Bologna, 1291-1310, we found that women tended to incriminate other women, while men incriminated across genders.
27 May 2024 Did medieval inquisitors fear accusations of sexual misconduct? It is a familiar image: a woman in distress, surrounded by men examining her soul in a dimly lit inquisitorial chamber. In fear of physical torture, she confesses to crimes she never committed. We bring you an online version of our article originally published in History Today.
10 Apr 2024 Map: Heresy and occupation in Bologna around 1300 DISSINET has developed an interactive map of the occupations, dissident religious affiliations, and locations of residence of nearly 900 persons suspected of heresy in the inquisition register of Bologna, 1291–1310.
29 Mar 2024 Towards a corpus of medieval inquisition records: First numbers Building upon the invaluable work of modern editors, the DISSINET project is building a textual corpus of medieval inquisitorial material, which now contains 15 registers, totals over 1.6 million tokens, and ranges from North-Central Italy through Languedoc to England, and from the 1230s until the 1520s.
6 Feb 2024 DISSINET’s article on the spatiality of heresy prosecutions published in Springer Nature’s Humanities and Social Science Communications DISSINET has published a new article on toponymic surnames and the spatiality of heresy prosecutions in a Springer-Nature journal, contributing to systematic analysis of European inquisition records as structured data.
1 Dec 2023 DISSINET in podcast DATAŘI David Zbíral and Tomáš Hampejs talk about inquisition records as digital capta with Jan Cibulka in the Czech Radio podcast „DATAŘI“.
27 Nov 2023 CASTEMO data blooms in Neo4j graph databases Great news! CASTEMO data collected in InkVisitor can now be readily outputted into Neo4j graph databases. Neo4j allows for collected data to be flexibly explored, queried, enriched, and analysed with graph tools.
9 Nov 2023 DISSINET’s article on sentencing in early inquisition trials published in Historical Methods DISSINET article applying computational methods to sentencing in early inquisition trials published in a top ranking journal Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History.
6 Oct 2023 Heresy Quantified - David Zbíral's professorship lecture David Zbíral's public lecture as part of the professorship procedure.
19 Sep 2023 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 2023 Mapping Waldensian “synagogues” DISSINET has published a map of Waldensian gathering places in Piedmont.
23 Jun 2023 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.
TIP 1 Jun 2023 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 2023 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 2023 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.
TIP 4 Aug 2022 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”.
20 Mar 2021 Interview with dr David Zbíral in Magazine M Dr David Zbíral on religious dissidence, computational interdisciplinary history, and the award of an ERC Consolidator Grant.
1 Mar 2021 Historical Geocoding Assistant in SoftwareX Historical Geocoding Assistant gains visibility through a publication in SoftwareX.
22 Feb 2021 Welcoming Reima Välimäki as a research associate We are proud to welcome a cultural historian dr. Reima Välimäki as a DISSINET research associate.
9 Dec 2020 ERC Consolidator Grant awarded to Dr. Zbíral Dr. Zbíral has been awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant for a five-year research project “Networks of Dissent: Computational Modelling of Dissident and Inquisitorial Cultures in Medieval Europe”.
8 Oct 2020 Dr Zbíral awarded the Rector’s Prize Dr Zbíral has been awarded the 2020 Masaryk University Rector's Prize for an exceptional research outcome.
5 Oct 2020 ERGM & ALAAM Quick Reference Sheet We have created a quick reference sheet for the statnet and MPNetimplementations of the ERGMs (Exponential Random Graph Model) and ALAAMs (Auto-Logistic Actor Attribute Model).
1 Sep 2020 DISSINET is looking for a research assistant The Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET) seeks a short-term research assistant with competence in Latin language and in historical research.
19 Aug 2020 Map: Premonstratensian monasteries in France New interactive map visualizing dataset of Premonstratensian houses in France from the foundation of the order up to the present.
3 Aug 2020 About DISSINET: Interview with Dr. David Zbíral Interview with the DISSINET project’s PI about DISSINET and the Digital Humanities.
2 Jul 2020 Why is the graph visualisation not always an ideal way to display network data? BLOG: When visualizing networks, a graph displaying this data as nodes connected with ties is definitely the first choice. However, this visualization often comes with significant disadvantages and should not be considered as the norm without considering other alternatives.
10 Jan 2020 Bibliography: 2,000 records The publicly available DISSINET bibliography in Zotero has reached 2,000 records.
21 Aug 2019 Article: Mining multiple sources of historical data New DISSINET paper published in the Proceedings of the International Cartographic Association.
17 Jun 2019 Map: Lollards, 1414–1522 The DISSINET team has recently been busy creating a digital map which shows the places of origin of Lollards based on their trial records.
28 Nov 2018 Grant of Excellence awarded to Dr. Zbíral Dr. Zbíral has been awarded the prestigious EXPRO grant of the Czech Science Foundation.
