After a Hiatus

It’s been over a year since I’ve worked on this project. I’m now returning for another class-defined project as part of my PhD coursework, intending to catch up on the work I set aside in April of 2021. The world seems different than it did then. The Covid-19 pandemic has become something new - if not a memory, at least something that takes up less of our immediate thoughts. Vaccines are readily available and lockdowns are long-past (for better or worse). Though we did pass through a series of something like 4 or 5 major variants to the original viral strain that shook the world, things seem to be moving back towards normal with conditionally hesitant steps.

As for this project, not much has been done in the interim. I have been focusing in my coursework more on the individualistic and embodied approaches to history than computational methods for the last few semesters. The link between the two is still clear in my mind, however I do wonder how to best utilize the methods and theories of mind — “hermeneutic” or “ontological,” I’m not sure — to tell the immensely personal stories of what amounts to medieval “big data.” I do not know if I’ll have a better answer of how to do that by December, but perhaps by then I’ll have another glimpse of a breadcrumb which will lead me in the direction I might go to do so. Marathon not a sprint, and all that.

This semester, I hope to continue my work exploring the ways I can model and analyze the data in the four years (in 5 printed editions - having found an additional re-printed, translated edition recently) of extant edited Pipe Rolls. Someday soon I hope to have access to the digitized editions of the whole run of the Rolls. Though this still does not answer all of my problems, as the entire series now costs about £1,000 to purchase via CD-ROM, and would still require hand-transcription and encoding before it could be used for any sort of computational analysis.

In any case, this semester I hope to do a better job of describing the actions I am taking to functionalize the extant data and the steps I take to do so. I will try to do this in as Open way as I can fashion, though I am still concerned with the copyright status of some of the volumes, which are currently © The Crown. Alas.