Team

Leadership

David Zbíral

 Academia.edu

David (Ph.D. in the Study of Religions from Masaryk University, 2008) is the lead author and principal investigator of the DISSINET project. He focuses on inquisitorial records from Languedoc and Lombardy (1230s-1320s) to make sense of the situational emergence, transmission, and functioning of rituals, beliefs, and organizational forms of dissident religious cultures. He is also interested in the spatial patterns of dissent, such as the spatial distribution of rituals and the mobility of dissident ministers, and in the discursive qualities of deposition narratives.

David Zbíral

Robert L. J. Shaw

 Academia.edu

Robert (DPhil in History from the University of Oxford, 2014) is the deputy principal investigator of the DISSINET project. His research, focused on Languedoc, systematically analyses the factors affecting the sentencing of dissidents, including social interactions and relationships. He is also interested in the path dependencies of the narratives found in inquisition records. His previous research has focused on the religious networks forged by late medieval monastic reform, both between cloisters and beyond them.

Robert Shaw

Jolana Navrátilová

 Academia.edu

Jolana (MA in Sociology and English language and literature from Masaryk University, 1998) is the managing assistant of the DISSINET project. She has worked in the university's international office and PR department, and participated in several NGO projects (including EU grant-funded projects). She also translates from English (both fiction and non-fiction) and enjoys sci-fi, medieval history, and walks.

Jolana Navrátilová

Ivona Vrzalová

Ivona (MA in English Language and Literature from Masaryk University, 2016) is the manager and admin of the OP JAK CoRe project (Beyond Security: Role of Conflict in Resilience-Building), and the managing assistant of the Department for the Study of Religions and HUME Lab.

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Research fellows

Stanislaw Banach

Stanislaw (MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, 2019) is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral dissertation is a comparative study of revolt and violent conflict across the towns of Silesia, Poland, and Prussia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. His interest in urban history carries over to DISSINET, where he concentrates on the inquisitions of Waldensians in Fribourg (1399, 1430) and Strasbourg (1400-1401).

Stanislaw Banach

Zoltán Brys

 

Zoltan (currently finishing his PhD in Sociology) is a computational social researcher. Before joining DISSINET he was teaching data analysis and social psychology and also doing research in these fields at Semmelweis University, Hungary. He received the Róbert Kolossváry Memorial Prize in 2021. Methodologically, he uses both traditional frequentist methods and modern techniques such as machine learning and network analysis. In the DISSINET project he focuses on social network analysis.

Zoltán Brys

Tomáš Hampejs

Tomáš (Ph.D. in the Study of Religions from Masaryk University, 2020) is a data analyst, programmer, and computational social and cognitive science enthusiast. He devises and maintains the digital infrastructure for data collection in the DISSINET project and designs various tools for data transformation. He is interested in social scientific theory, the formalized modelling of complex phenomena, and bridging the social and the cognitive aspects of religion.

Tomáš Hampejs

Gideon Kotzé

Gideon (PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Groningen, 2013) is a researcher and developer with special interest in text corpora, treebanks, machine translation, digitization, and wordnets. Before joining DISSINET, he worked on a web application for geographical terminology and a mobile application for place names in English and South African Sign Language. In the DISSINET project, he works on the representation and data storage of a corpus of inquisitorial records, while applying text mining and other natural language processing techniques for the extraction of useful information for visualization and research.

Gideon Kotzé

Katia Riccardo

Academia.edu

Katia (MA in Medieval Studies from Utrecht University, 2020) joined the DISSINET project as a Ph.D. candidate in the study of religions at Masaryk University. Her previous research has focused on the political and religious history of the early Middle Ages, with a particular focus on theological debates in the Carolingian period. Within the DISSINET project she studies the beliefs and practices of Cathars and Apostles as they emerge from the trial interactions contained in the inquisitorial register of Bologna (1291-1310). With the employment of computational techniques such as CTA and SNA, she aims to analyse the depositions of the people involved and the discursive patterns of their testimonies, focusing on the declarations of their beliefs as well as reporting on other people related to their social network.

Adam Mertel

Kaarel Sikk

Academia.edu

Kaarel (PhD in Quantitative Geography at the University of Luxemburg, 2022) is a data / software engineer who has turned to research. Before joining DISSINET he was studying archaeological data science focusing on spatial data. His interests include spatial statistics, exploratory data analysis, complex adaptive systems, and emergence in the context of historical social processes. In his doctoral work, he uses various modelling techniques to study archaeological settlement pattern formation processes as self-organising complex systems. In the DISSINET project he focuses on geospatial data analysis, cartography, geographical application development, as well as spatial statistics and modelling.

Katia Riccardo

Katalin Suba

Academia.edu

Katalin (MA in Medieval Art History from Eötvös Loránd University, 2018) is a PhD candidate in art history with an interest in medieval textual sources. Before joining DISSINET, she was involved in research focusing on the comparative analysis of medieval rituals. Within DISSINET, she studies the rituals of dissident religious communities using quantitative methods.

Kaarel Sikk

Software developers

Adam Mertel

Academia.edu

Adam (Ph.D. in Cartography, geoinformatics and remote sensing from Masaryk University, 2020) is a geospatial analyst and applications developer. He leads the development of the InkVisitor research environment including the DISSINET research database. He also explores DISSINET data through maps, applications, and analyses.

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Ján Mertel

Ján is a software engineer, graduated with Master's degree at Brno University of Technology (VUT). During his studies, he started working in smaller/bigger startups which helped him explore multiple areas from fintech, management, to software architecture or system administration.

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Petr Hanák

Petr is a programmer with a background in engineering, having contributed to tram predevelopment at ŠKODA transportation and jet trainer Albatros at Aero Vodochody. He currently focuses on building user interface for InkVisitor.

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Peter Ondrejka

Peter (Ph.D. in Cartography, geoinformatics and remote sensing from Masaryk University) worked in various positions in the software industry. He focuses on design and development of interactive maps and user interfaces.

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Associates

Tomáš Diviák

Tomáš received his PhD in sociology from the University of Groningen and Charles University. He currently holds a position of Presidential Fellow at the University of Manchester. Set within the framework of analytical sociology, his research focuses on the application of social network analysis (specifically statistical models for networks) to the study of covert networks. He is one of the founders of the Czech Network for Social Network Analysis, an informal association of network researchers in the Czech Republic.

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Larissa de Freitas Lyth

 

Larissa (MA in History from Universidade Federal do Paraná, 2021) is  a Ph.D. candidate in the study of medieval history in Cambridge. Her previous research has focused on magical practices and sexuality in the Early Middle Ages. Within DISSINET, she studies 15th-century witchcraft trials and the imagery surrounding the witches’ sabbath. With the aid of quantitative approaches such as natural language processing and social network analysis she analyses how the narrativity and interactivity in the trials affected the way inquisitorial discourse against witchcraft was formed and how medieval knowledge of heresy was perpetuated and transformed in early witchcraft trials.

Larissa de Freitas Lyth

Reima Välimäki

Academia.edu

Reima is a cultural historian focusing on late medieval inquisition and Waldensianism, polemical literature and the Great Western Schism. He is interested in combining computational tools such as text reuse analysis and authorship attribution with qualitative study of medieval texts and manuscripts. Reima is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies and Adjunct Professor of Medieval History at the University of Turku.

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