Workshop on digital tools for exploring medieval charters

3:00 – 4:50 p.m.
Wednesday, February 4
Rolfe 2118

ChartEx: Tools for the Analysis of Medieval Charters. ChartEx, or “Charter Excavator,” is a collaborative digital humanities project developed as part of the second round of the Digging into Data Challenge.  The core tools, still in development, are designed to “read” full text medieval documents (charters) using Natural Language Processing, identify persons and places in individual documents, and then propose relationships between the persons and places identified across a set of charters using data mining techniques.  After an introduction to the project, students will have an opportunity to experiment with the annotation tool used to train the system, and with the virtual workbench used to analyze and manipulate the data.

Adam Kosto, Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York, specializes in the institutional history of medieval Europe, with a focus on Catalonia and the Mediterranean. He received his B.A. from Yale (1989), an M.Phil. from Cambridge (1990), and his Ph.D. from Harvard (1996). He is the author of Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000-1200 (Cambridge UP, 2001) and  Hostages in the Middle Ages (Oxford UP, 2012), and co-editor of The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950-1350 (Ashgate, 2005), Charters, Cartularies, and Archives: The Preservation and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West (PIMS, 2002), and Documentary Practices and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge UP, 2012).

Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies