Mapping Medieval Chester

Three members of the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project team will be speaking at the Chester 2010 symposium in Toronto, Canada, to share our research on the medieval city. Catherine Clarke, Mark Faulkner and Paul Vetch will be giving presentations in a special session sponsored by the Toronto Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Mark will speak on ‘Schematic Topography in Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie‘, Catherine on ‘A Tale of Two Cities? English and Welsh Perspectives on Medieval Chester’, and Paul will discuss the innovative technical aspects of the project in his contribution ‘Mapping Medieval Chester: Creating a Hybrid Digital Publication’.

The Chester 2010 symposium will offer some unique new perspectives on place and identity in Chester. As well as presentations from a wide range of scholars, the symposium includes a staging of the complete Chester cycle, with each pageant produced and performed by a group from a different North American university or college. We hope to bring back lots of new ideas about the interactions between the plays, their physical environment, and their audiences in the late-medieval / early modern city.

There’s still some final work to be done on the website before it’s complete – and it won’t ever be completely ‘finished’ or static as we aim to add to it and develop it in future, primarily via the blog and discussions here, but also through the addition of further resources. At the moment, we want to do some further work on the digital maps, improving speed, sorting the zoom function (low bandwidth) and allowing users to move from the locations in the atlas (high bandwidth version) to the texts, via the ‘Place’ index. We’re also planning to build an additional map which can be overlaid with Google Maps, to give a better idea of the relation between the medieval and modern city, and to incorporate the layer of photos from Flickr which give snapshots of medieval locations in the city today (more about that in the next post!).

Those of you who joined us at the colloquium in Swansea have heard some discussion of what we aimed to achieve in these digital resources and the kind of functionality we’ve tried to develop. I wanted to include some reflections here on the methods and processes which we brought to the website.

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Well, I’ve just sent off 1200 lines of the Bradshaw text, edited and XML encoded, to the team at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London. I think I’m ordering take-away tonight.

This feels like a major milestone: over the past four months I’ve been working hard on the text itself, as well as getting to grips with the encoding language. In fact, the XML has proved rather satisfying in the end. Whilst I suspect I’ve been using parts of my brain I’ve never exercised before, it’s very pleasing to get a feel for the protocols and patterns and watch the lines of code grow – a bit like knitting a scarf.

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The three members of the project team who are charged with editing the literary descriptions of medieval Chester descended on London on Wednesday to discuss how our website will eventually look.

One thing that really excited me is that the website will be able to replicate some aspects of a medieval reader’s encounter with manuscript books far more closely than a printed edition can. (more…)