Katia Riccardo's PhD dissertation is now available online and awaiting defense. The dissertation, which consists of five complementary studies on Cathar and Apostolic communities, as well as on inquisitorial and notarial practices, showcases how a diverse array of digital humanities methods can be applied to address specific historical questions across a particularly rich inquisitorial register.
We are proud to announce that Katia Riccardo, who has been a member of DISSINET since 2021, has officially submitted her PhD dissertation "A computational analysis of inquisitorial language and relationship networks in the inquisition register of Bologna (1291-1310)", now available online and awaiting defense.
This study offers the most comprehensive digital humanities study to date of the Bologna inquisition register (1291–1310), one of the richest surviving sources for inquisitorial activity in medieval Italy. By bringing together historical expertise with quantitative modelling, network science, and computational linguistics, the thesis demonstrates how a heterogeneous set of DH methods can be applied to address specific historical questions within a single complex medieval source.
Through five complementary case studies – including on Cathar and Apostolic communities, and anti-inquisitorial unrest – the research reconstructs social relationships, analyses inquisitorial language, and identifies structural patterns not visible through conventional reading. The findings show how dissent was embedded in everyday social networks, how inquisitorial and notarial practices shaped the register, and how incrimination and punishment correlated with social predictors.The study also reveals traces of collaborative authorship between inquisitors and notaries.
Overall, the dissertation highlights the value of interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse approaches for producing systematic, transparent, and nuanced interpretations of medieval documentary sources.
Kaarel Sikk, David Zbíral, and Reima Välimäki have published a new study in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities that examines how Peter Zwicker's inquisition in Stettin (1393–94) utilised information gathered from deponent testimonies over the course of subsequent interrogations. The analysis of network and temporal data offers a fresh perspective on strategic decision-making by inquisitors.
We have published the DISSICON dataset (which stands for DISSINET Conceptual Network), offering an ontology for analysing medieval inquisition records and other trial documents. It formalizes actions, concepts, and their relationships to support computational analyses of historical material.
