ChartEx

ChartEx was an innovative eighteen-month international project involving Medieval historians from York, Toronto, Washington, and Columbia, working in collaboration with researchers in Natural Language Processing at University of Brighton UK, Data Mining at Leiden, and HCI at York. The aim was to explore the possibility of using Natural Langauage Processing and Data Mining to extract entity and relation information from digitised medieval charters.

Charters record legal transactions of property of all kinds: houses, workshops, fields and meadows and describe the people who lived there. Long before records such as censuses or birth registers existed charters were and still are the major resource for researching people, for tracing changes in communities over time and for finding ancestors.

The project would demonstrate its approach using medieval charters, which survive in abundance from the 12th to the 16th centuries and are one of the richest sources for studying the lives of people in the past.

The new ChartEx tools used a combination of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Data Mining to extract information about places, people and events in their lives from the charters automatically and find new relationships between these entities.

The project then built an interactive "virtual workbench" that would allow historians, archivists and others interested in charters to explore the information extracted and add further information and comments.

This workbench would enable researchers to really dig into the content of the records, to recover their rich descriptions of places and people, and to go far beyond current digital catalogues which restrict searches to a few key facts about each document.

The project was funded through the Digging into Data Challenge, which aimed to address how "big data" changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences.

Outputs

• Roger Evans delivered an invited talk at the The 1st International Workshop on Histoinformatics, which was organised in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Social Informatics. held in Kyoto, Japan in November 2013:
    Exploring medieval charters: the ChartEx Project
    Video demonstration of the ChartEx Virtual Workbench
• Members of the ChartEx consortium presented the project at Digital Diplomatics 2013, held in Paris, France in November 2013:
   ChartEx: Tools for excavating and interpreting data about places, locations and people from medieval charters [PDF]
    Video demonstration of the ChartEx Virtual Workbench
• Members of the ChartEx consortium presented the project at the 2013 Digging into Data Challenge Conference, held in Montréal, Canada in October 2013:
    ChartEx: Discovering spatial descriptions and relationships in medieval charters
    Video demonstration of the ChartEx Virtual Workbench
• Sarah Rees Jones conducted a workshop on new skills for early career researchers working with manuscripts at The National Archives, Kew, London in September 2013:
   The ChartEx experience: a medievalist's experience of collaboration in the design of new software tools for working with manuscripts
• Sarah Rees Jones and Helen Petrie presented a paper on the ChartEx Project at Digital Humanities 2013, held in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA in July 2013:
ChartEx: Discovering spatial descriptions and relationships in medieval charters [PDF]
Arno Knobbe delivered a presentation on the ChartEx Project at Digital Heritage 2013 in York, UK on 6 July 2013:
    ChartEx: Digging into Medieval Data
•  Members of the ChartEx consortium delivered a series of presentations at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds, UK in July 2013:
•  ChartEx: Discovering spatial descriptions and relationships in medieval charters [PDF]
   People, places and events in charters: exploring the language of charters within ChartEx
   Reconstructing spatial relationships from charters: a collaboration between Data    Mining and Historical Topography [PDF]
   Developing a Virtual Workbench for Charter Historians [PDF]
• Robin Sutherland-Harris and Jon Crump gave a presentation on the ChartEx Project at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute Colloquium, at the University of Victoria, Canada, on 10 June 2013.
   Exploring Personal and Spatial Relationships in Collections of Medieval Charters: The ChartEx Project
   In addition to a number of tweets that were made about the presentation, it was also mentioned as a highlight of the event in this blog post
•  Arno Knobbe delivered an invited talk on the ChartEx Project at the CATCH Midterm Event, on 14 December 2012:
   ChartEx: Digging into Medieval Data [PDF - large file]
Poster [PDF]
• Sarah Rees Jones, Roger Evans and Helen Petrie delivered a seminar on the ChartEx Project to the London Digital Humanities Group, on 11 December 2012:
   ChartEx: Mining spatial descriptions in medieval charters [PDF]
•  Chris Power and Sarah Rees Jones gave a presentation on the ChartEx Project at a Proposition Workshop, organised by the Centre for Digital Heritage in York, on 15 November 2012:
   ChartEx: Discovering spatial descriptions and relationships in medieval charters [PDF]
• Sarah Rees Jones and Chris Power presented a paper on the ChartEx Project at the Digital Humanities Symposium - Virtualisation and Heritage, held in York on 25 February 2012:
   Capturing and visualising data from medieval charters about people and their lived environment: Introducing a new 'Digging into Data' research project [PDF]