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

Abstract

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