The purpose of this project, which was funded by the Jean Golding Institute, was to explore the use of ‘Digital Humanities methodologies’ in analysing an English-language translation of a medieval Latin document. The project was a collaboration between Professor Brendan Smith (PI, History) and Mike Jones (co-I, Research IT). 

We used data analysis tools and techniques to extract financial data and entities (e.g., people, places and communities) from the translation. This process then enabled the creation of example visualisations, to better interpret and understand the data and prompt further research questions. 

The project used a full English-language edition of the roll edited by Brendan Smith and Dr Paul Dryburgh (The National Archives) and published in the Handbook of Select Calendar of Sources for Medieval Ireland in the National Archives of the United Kingdom (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2005). A Python script was developed to trawl the text, looking for details of interest, namely dates and payments, and add them to a CSV (tabular data) format. This allowed the data to be queried and visualised.