Lessons learnt from exploring Cyfraith Hywel through a digital lens

Bartliff, Z. (2022) Lessons learnt from exploring Cyfraith Hywel through a digital lens. International Congress on the Study of the Middle Ages 2022, Leeds, UK, 07 Jul 2022.

Abstract

This presentation explores an example of how Digital Humanities methodologies might be utilised to engage with the Cyfraith Hywel (CH) tradition and, through doing so, explore macro-scale comprehension of its contents. The law text CH, extant in over 80 manuscripts and books between the 13th and 18th centuries is widely considered to have been a cornerstone of Welsh identity throughout the medieval. Despite its importance, scholarship has reached an impasse in exploring the material, acknowledging the need for a holistic perspective on the tradition. However, due to the complexity of the material and inaccessibility of available editions of CH, the accurate application of DH methods has proven challenging. This presentation discusses the processes of manual intervention that allowed for DH methods to benefit CH scholarship by consolidating existing organisational and presentational conventions for CH to create a standardised corpus of 21 manually encoded manuscripts from the CH tradition. The encoding enriches the original text with structural and grammatical metadata enabling users to efficiently access the corpus at multiple levels of granularity. The presentation further goes on to demonstrate the application of measures of similarity, to highlight previously unrecognised or uncertain relationships and patterns that exist within and between the encoded manuscripts. This falls within a wider research project that involves combining quantitative and qualitative data this approach enhances modern comprehension of CH therefore providing alternative methodological avenues that supplement and advance existing scholarship.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Additional Information: Paper Paper 1716-c presented in Session 1716: Crossing Borders: Methodological, Material, and Linguistic.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Bartliff, Dr Zoe
• Authors: Bartliff, Z.
• Subjects: D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D111 Medieval History; Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > Z665 Library Science. Information Science
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities > Information Studies
• Copyright Holders: Copyright: © 2022 The Author
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced with permission of the author

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