Thesis project on SOLEMNE

About SOLEMNE

Historian Sven Meeder has been awarded an ERC grant to investigate a digital humanities approach to the study of clergy documents as evidence of life in the early Middle Ages. Can we computers help us see through the lens of collections of Canon Law to reveal how “normal people” thought at the time, and help us understand how norms and values develop throughout history?

Your profile

• MSc student in computer science or information science
• Knowledge of information retrieval and databases
• Programming experience; preferably familiar with Python
• Ability to work independently
• Participate actively in discussions

Master thesis opportunity

The assignment is to investigate how to best satisfy the information needs of historians in SOLEMNE, with a focus on the support of searches for common patterns (similarities and differences) in a network of historically relevant liteture, both the 19th and 20th scientific literature about source documents from the Middle Ages, and from the documents themselves. From a computer science perspective, the interest is to assess suitability of GeeseDB, a prototype graph database with advanced information retrieval functionalities, to handle information access needs on this network of historic documents. We have access to the historians in this field to help understand their key information needs, and to let us uncover the structure of this world of historic documents that they aim to study.