Digital Humanities, Medieval History, and Lexicography: The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources

Speaker: Dr. Sara Uckelman, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Durham University (U.K.)

In an ideal world, digital humanities collaborations would involve experts on both sides: Experts in some field of the humanities pooling their resources with experts on the technical and computational side of things. Unfortunately, the world is not always ideal. Many DH projects receive their impetus on the humanities side, and thus involve someone without the technical/computational skills looking to collaborate with someone who does; while many other DH projects are constructed by people in the sciences hoping to make their work more interdisciplinary.  Both such approaches raise problems for the best deployment of digital techniques and processes. In this talk, we focus on a recently-launched (2015) large-scale, multi-year digital humanities project involving researchers across Europe, America, and Australia, dedicated to the study of given names found in European sources between 500 and 1600, the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources (dmnes.org), using it as a illustration of some of the pitfalls that DH projects can fall into, and suggest ways out of these barriers, as well as argue for the continued importance of projects that truly blend the digital/technology and the humanistic.

The Dictionary of Medieval names from European Sources: http://dmnes.org/

Speaker’s Lunch: 12:30 – 13:30

Lecture: 14:00 – 15:00