People of Medieval Scotland, 1093-1314

2013 Workshop / Monday 29 July, 2013

In this talk, John Davies describes the prosopographical approaches adopted on two University of Glasgow AHRC projects completed in conjunction with King’s College London: The Breaking of Britain: Cross-Border Society and Scottish Independence, 1216-1314; and especially the recently launched People of Medieval Scotland, 1093-1314. John provides a breakdown of the biographical information contained in the charters used in the creation of the databases, and provides a detailed overview of the complex data structures used to connect people and institutions to places, transactions, and sources, especially by means of a sophisticated system of ‘factoids’. John concludes by demonstrating some experimental visualizations generated from the data, including word clouds, Sankey diagrams, and social network diagrams.