The scholars behind The Community of the Realm in Scotland wanted to show how new ways of representing medieval texts in digital media can yield new understandings of medieval political communities and their written manifestations. The short but historically significant document they chose as basis for a proof-of-concept – the Declaration of Arbroath from 1320 – became a locus of textual change as it was circulated and copied in Scotland in the central Middle Ages. While variation is commonplace in early textual transmission, the scholars were particularly interested in identifying locations of ‘unsettled’ text, where the difference between what is found in one manuscript and another would be likely to alter the way a word is read or understood. Initial work on the project involved KDL and the scholars discussing and refining the definitions of core concepts from abstractions to material manifestations. From these discussions KDL created a data model that would guide the scholars’ editorial work and provide the foundation for the design and development team to plan for how the textual data would be processed, stored and then presented in the public-facing website. With multiple manuscript witnesses organized into six version groups the challenge was to make all the editorial information available to users without overwhelming them and without losing sight of the overall goal of showing the most ‘unsettled’ areas. The developer and the UI/UX specialist worked closely together on a text viewer interface which uses colour-coding and symbols to indicate the presence of unsettled text and show commonalities and differences among the different manuscripts. An early strand of the approaches that come under KDL’s Data Visualisation research theme, interactive visualizations such as a heatmap and a region viewer were included in the site to help users navigate the complexity of the data.
Team
- Alice Taylor Principal investigator, FAH Department of History
- Dauvit Broun University of Glasgow Co-Investigator
- Geoffroy Noël KDL Research Software Engineer
- Ginestra Ferraro Research Software Designer
- John Reuben Davies Researcher, University of Glasgow
- Matthew Hammond Researcher, University of Glasgow
- Paul Caton KDL Research Software Analyst
- Steve Boardman Co-Investigator, University of Edinburgh