Models of Authority

Feature of the Month January 2016: Stewart Brookes

As regular readers of our Feature of the Month series will be aware, the preceding pieces have taken as their focus the historical aspects of the project, including the formulas of charter diplomatic, scribal choice and elements of style in the palaeography. These are, of course, key to our intention to study medieval Scottish charters as a means to shed light on the origins of government in western Europe. The focus of this article is to introduce another dimension of our research which is from the perspective of Digital Humanities and the ways in which we are ectending the set of tools developed as part of the DigiPal framework in order to meet the challenges and opportunities presented by the Models of Authority project. 

I will begin, if I may, by creating a little context for this article by summarising the aporach we took when developing the DigiPal framework. 

Blurb à la Orietta paper. Note that we specifically chose MoA as it presented an opportunity 

To explore research questions of interest to DH. Filtering challenge.

1) Zoomview

2) Search clauses

3) Marking up clauses

4) Christianus using "Chi rho" -- cf. image Tessa showed of list of names.

Screengrab of marking up clauses?

W. Rex example?

Merovingian coin digits of the Bnf

From Typography to Coin Epigraphy and Back: Investigating and Publishing Medieval Coin Inscription with NumiPal

4) Text editor: A mix of Django/ HTML5/ TinyMCE and several jQuery plugins 

[1] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fkPurQEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=DigiPal%20Project%20for%20European%20Scripts&f=false

or JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt17mvjbg

WIBLI -- other projects drive develoment of the software features and interface which are of benefit to al other projects using the DigiPal framework. SephardiPal; ScandiPal; NumiPal'

Francis Spufford, Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the Brtish Boffin; (London: Faber and Faber, 2003)

p. 92: 'You start with a wish list. Then you engage with the difficulty of executing it. You find ways to vest some wishes in solid metal or solid code. Other wishes, though they shine temptingly bright, you never find the means of realising; you discard them, and they aren't partt of the finished thing, be it suspenion bridge, program or novel. That's how making goes. [..] working through the inevitable compromises, losing some of what you first thought of, is still a process of gain [...] But sometimes the process goes further. Some of the best bridges, programs, novels -- not all of the best, but some -- come about because their makers have immmersed themselves in the task with such concentration, such intent openess to what the task may bring, that the effort of making wishes real itself breeds new wishes. From the thick of the task, in the midst of the practical hammering, the makers see further possibilities that wouldn't have been visible except from there, from that spot, from that degree of engagement with the task. The process of creation itself enables more creativity."

that developments in the production of charters would bear some relationship to the changing nature of government.

This project is an attempt to rise to this challenge through not only the tried and tested methods of analysing charters but also through the development of a new digital resource.

Not only will this enable the analysis of the diplomatic and palaeography across the corpus to reach new levels of precision and sophistication, especially when both aspects are combined, but it will also allow anyone with access to the web to analyse the palaeography and diplomatic of the charters for themselves.

The core purpose of the project is to capture the complexity of charters, and only then think about the relationship between this and the emergence of continuous government. I would be disappointed if this was straightforward!

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