Mateusz Fafinski and Elaine Treharne: "Networks of Memory: Automating Script in Time and Space"

Note: this seminar will be a hybrid event. We are looking forward to welcoming you back into our space! A box lunch will be available to in-person attendees for takeaway. Zoom attendees can register using the link above.

About this talk: This seminar will introduce participants to a new digital project on two major manuscripts surviving from the earlier thirteenth century that attest to the commemoration of senior female religious figures. We have created an interactive map that displays historical and geographical data, coupled with palaeographical and contextual investigation, of some four hundred religious houses. From this have emerged extensive networks of religious association that are beginning to yield rich results, encouraging an essential reappraisal of the development of writing from 1200-1250 and a reassessment of our understanding of literacy and memorialization in this period.

About the speakers:

Elaine Treharne, the Roberta Bowman Denning Professor in the Stanford Department of English, is a Welsh medievalist with specializations in manuscript studies, archives, information technologies, and early British literature. Recent publications include Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book (Oxford University Press, 2021) and, with Claude Willan, Text Technologies: A History (Stanford University Press, 2019). Her newest work concerns the application of machine learning and AI to investigate medieval manuscripts and the transmission of textual culture. Two new book projects are underway: an Introduction to Manuscript Studiesand a new collaboration with Greg Walker, Landscapes of Immortality, which investigates sacred sites, memorialisation, and the human desire to be remembered.

Mateusz Fafinski is a historian and digital humanist, currently a postdoc at University of Lausanne, and an Assistant Lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin. Previously, he was a TextTechnologies Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. Mateusz  works on the nature of historical sources in the digital sphere, mapping medieval Latin manuscripts, and the role of urban space in Early Medieval societies as well as the inheritance of Rome in the post-Roman world. He is the author of Roman Infrastructure in Early Medieval Britain: The Adaptations of the Past in Text and Stone (Amsterdam University Press, 2019).