Digital Humanities Projects
Rusian Genealogical Database
"The Rusian Genealogical Database is both a new genealogy of the Rusian royal family, the Riurikids, and their connections with other royal families throughout Europe and a new way of organizing and utilizing that information.
The end result is a compilation of the relevant genealogical information for the Riurikids of the eleventh and twelfth century. For most members of the family basic information, such as birth, death, marriage, and regnal dates, are available and sourced. Where sources are available for marriages made prior to 1146, there is a note that explains the sources and contextualizes the marriage in Rusian - and often broader European - history. This allows for much more than a static genealogical chart. The user has the ability to move seamlessly across generations, tracking rulers by city, by date, and by family, and reading deeply about the circumstances behind relationships. The goal is a better understanding of the Riurikids and Rus' and their place in the wider European world."
Orbis: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World
"Spanning one-ninth of the earth's circumference across three continents, the Roman Empire ruled a quarter of humanity through complex networks of political power, military domination and economic exchange. These extensive connections were sustained by premodern transportation and communication technologies that relied on energy generated by human and animal bodies, winds, and currents.
Conventional maps that represent this world as it appears from space signally fail to capture the severe environmental constraints that governed the flows of people, goods and information. Cost, rather than distance, is the principal determinant of connectivity.
For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.
Taking account of seasonal variation and accommodating a wide range of modes and means of transport, ORBIS reveals the true shape of the Roman world and provides a unique resource for our understanding of premodern history."
Mapping the Republic of Letters
"Before email, faculty meetings, international colloquia, and professional associations, the world of scholarship relied on its own networks: networks of correspondence that stretched across countries and continents; the social networks created by scientific academies; and the physical networks brought about by travel. These networks were the lifelines of learning, from the age of Erasmus to the age of Franklin. They facilitated the dissemination;and the criticism;of ideas, the spread of political news, as well as the circulation of people and objects.
But what did these networks actually look like? Were they as extensive as we are led to believe? How did they evolve over time? Mapping the Republic of Letters, in collaboration with international partners, seeks to answer these and other questions through the development of sophisticated, interactive visualization tools. It also aims to create a repository for metadata on early-modern scholarship, and guidelines for future data capture."
Kindred Britain
"Kindred Britain is a network of nearly 30,000 individuals - many of them iconic figures in British culture - connected through family relationships of blood, marriage, or affiliation. It is a vision of the nation's history as a giant family affair."
Online Versions of Print Resources
The Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität (LBG)
This site is the result of a collaboration between the Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität (LBG) published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Die Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften) and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae® (TLG®) at the University of California, Irvine.
Modern Language Translations of Greek Sources
An enormous searchable database of full text files of Greek, East Roman, and Byzantine primary sources translated into modern languages.