Team
Members
David Zbíral
David is the author and principal investigator of the DISSINET project. He focuses on inquisitorial records from Occitania, Lombardy, and Tuscany (1230s-1320s). His special interest is the situational emergence and transmission of institutions in social interaction, such as rituals, norms, and organizational forms. He is also interested in spatial patterns of dissent, such as the spatial distribution of rituals and the mobility of dissident ministers.
Tomáš Hampejs
Tomáš 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.
Jan Král
Jan is a student member of the DISSINET team. He focuses on episcopal investigations against dissidents broadly defined as Lollards in late 14th- to 16th-century England. His special interest is gender, occupation, social status, and literacy in dissident communities from a network perspective.
Robert Shaw
Robert is a historian whose research within DISSINET uses network and geographical analysis to unlock patterns of punishment and resistance in Occitan communities undergoing inquisition. He is particularly interested in how these interactions affected social connections and perceptions over time. His previous research has focused on the religious networks forged by late medieval monastic reform, both between cloisters and beyond them.
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.
Reima Välimäki
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.
