News | Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET)

22 Oct

Hidden mechanisms of religious authority contestation: 4,433 inquisition testimonies across 300 years

Which medieval men and women were most prone to challenging the Church? Analysing 4,433 inquisitorial testimonies (1243–1522), a DISSINET study in the Journal of Cultural Analytics traces how contestation varied by religious group, gender, urban or rural setting, and period. It identifies women and countryfolk as the more frequent challengers, and finds that criticism grew over the period studied.

8 Sep

Medieval anti-heretical hate speech. Funded Ph.D. opportunity, deadline for expressions of interest: 5 October 2026

The Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET) invites applications from prospective Ph.D. students interested in digital and quantitative approaches to medieval anti-heretical hate speech. Successful candidates will join an international interdisciplinary research environment at Masaryk University. Expressions of interest are due by 5 October 2026.

2 Sep

What we read, mapped: the (inter)disciplinary shape of DISSINET's library

A visualisation of DISSINET's more than 11,000-item Zotero library mapped by subject domain, root collection down to individual topic, shows the team’s focus in bibliographic terms, and how that reading spans history, network science, and computational text analysis.

31 Aug

Medieval inquisition records: interactive map and metadata

The DISSINET (Dissident Networks Project) research group is releasing Medieval inquisition records: Interactive map, a web application bringing together metadata for a corpus of medieval inquisitorial registers and, where available, their geocoded place-name content.

29 Aug

AI Augmented Historical Research

From conversation to folder: a guide to spark imagination about what’s possible when genAI works over your files, not just a chat window, in document-heavy historical research; written up from an internal DISSINET workshop.

27 Aug

Locations from medieval inquisition registers: interactive map and dataset

The DISSINET (Dissident Networks Project) research group is releasing Locations mentioned in medieval inquisition registers: Interactive map, a web application that makes searchable and filterable a dataset of geocoded place mentions drawn from sixteen medieval inquisitorial registers.

30 Jun

DISSINET at IMC Leeds and DH2026 in South Korea

This summer, DISSINET will present its research at two major international events - the IMC 2026 in Leeds and DH2026 in South Korea - highlighting its work on medieval religious dissent and advancing the integration of medieval studies with digital innovation.

28 Jun

Conference presentations showcase DISSINET applications of LLMs, SNA, and CASTEMO

Our researchers have recently dicussed DISSINET's methodological innovations at major conferences across Europe, showcasing the diversity of our research outputs.

4 May

OP JAK CoRe welcomes visiting researchers for 3-8 month stays

The Johannes Amos Commenius OP project “Beyond Security: Role of Conflict in Resilience-Building” invites doctoral, postdoctoral or senior researchers to apply for 3–8‑month salaried visiting stay, focused on the semantic annotation and computational analysis of hate speech in medieval antiheretical literature.

17 Apr

Coding a heresy trial, one clause at a time

Our new article published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities uses the trial record of Bernard-Oth of Niort and his family to demonstrate the benefits of Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling (CASTEMO), a custom approach that not only captures informational content but also its discursive and contextual embedding.

19 Feb

Medieval anti-heretical hate speech: Support in submitting a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc application (MSCA-PF), expression of interest by 16 March 2026

Doctoral graduates are invited to apply for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action postdoctoral fellowship (MSCA-PF) within our digital humanities project using large‑scale computational methods to study medieval hate speech and anti‑heretical discourse. Send us a preliminary research proposal by 16 March 2026.