The DM Environment: From Annotation to Dissemination

DM (formerly Digital Mappaemundi) is an online environment that allows users to easily assemble collections of images and texts for study, produce their own rich analysis data, and publish online resources for individual, group or public use. DM is ready for multi-year work with five partner projects (including a new partnership with the British Library) to implement a publicly available user-friendly environment that enables users to 1) assemble collections of resources from any combination of accessible repositories; 2) create richly linked data (e.g., annotation networks involving combinations of images, texts, fragments, web resources, and other annotations) and collections, sequences and indices that organize this data; 3) export data in a number of linked data formats; and 4) easily produce publicly accessible and interactive websites based on such data and linked data published elsewhere

Creating and curating an archive: Bury St Edmunds and its Anglo-Saxon past

This contribution explores the mechanisms by which the Benedictine foundation of Bury St Edmunds sought to legitimise and preserve their spurious pre-Conquest privileges and holdings throughout the Middle Ages. The archive is extraordinary in terms of the large number of surviving registers and cartularies which contain copies of Anglo-Saxon charters, many of which are wholly or partly in Old English. The essay charts the changing use to which these ancient documents were put in response to threats to the foundation's continued enjoyment of its liberties. The focus throughout the essay is to demonstrate how pragmatic considerations at every stage affects the development of the archive and the ways in which these linguistically challenging texts were presented, re-presented, and represented during the Abbey’s history

Digital Mappaemundi: A Resource for the Study of Medieval Maps and Geographic Texts

Digital Mappaemundi (DM) is designed to enable scholars to edit networks of text and image data, and users to search within and link between these documents. Our data are medieval "maps of the world" and their geographical source texts. These transdisciplinary, transmedia works provide a perfect basis for development of an extensible, open source tool useful for other humanities projects. DM provides new interactions within maps and texts through an interface in which these documents can be examined individually and relationally, i.e., as a database of documents searchable for points of origin, correlation and difference. Users search across edited items for specific details, and results take users to exact spots on maps and in literature, and create cross-referenced lists of comparable material across items searched. DM develops extensible markup language (XML) tags to easily edit data to points in images and texts, so all documents can be linked through shared content

Gildas

International audienceGildas est le premier auteur britannique à témoigner des événements postérieurs au départ des légions romaines. C'est par l'analyse de ses modèles, principalement bibliques, et de ses buts que son récit historique allusif, si frustrant, peut être compris et interprété comme un témoignage de premier plan

Tall tales from the archive

The administrative documents preserved in archives tell stories which are shaped by their institutional and governmental context, and are as deceptive and full of invention as more self-consciously literary works. Medieval archives contain a vast repository of historical narratives which, despite their fictional components and bureaucratic manipulation, nevertheless provide vivid insights into everyday life. The rhetorical conventions of such bureaucratic documents as pardons, petitions and appeals represent forms of historical literature which are cultural productions of equal significance to the chronicle or the epic poem. But, unlike court poetry or chronicles, the archives tell us a great deal about the life of ordinary people. In the wake of the discussion of the archive by Foucault and Derrida, the archive has been seen as a symbol of power and a means of control, but often the archive is the chief means by which non-elite groups find their voice