The official website of InkVisitor, a state-of-the-art environment for the collection of complex data from texts developed in the Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET) at Masaryk University, is now launched.
Since the very beginning of the Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET) in 2019, we have been developing InkVisitor, a unique research environment for the collection of complex data from texts following the approach to data collection that we call Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling – CASTEMO. CASTEMO’s vocation is to produce relational data available to any variety of computational analysis while preserving the syntactic and semantic texture of texts, including their original expressions, ambiguities, and inconsistencies. CASTEMO aims at comprehensively modelling texts (historical sources, interview transcripts etc.) and at subsequently using this structured data in any relevant computational analysis. CASTEMO is part of the broader family of statement-based approaches to data collection (rather than those directly constructing facts), and is highly relevant to research endeavours where it matters to preserve the original expression, context, and other discursive features.
Now, the InkVisitor research environment, which has been out for some time under an open licence (the BSD 3-Clause License), has its dedicated website. Read more about InkVisitor and CASTEMO there, and talk to us if you are interested in access to a sandbox account. This will enable you to test all the features without needing to have your IT support install InkVisitor on your own server. We hope you will like the new website and will also take a moment to test InkVisitor itself!
Zbíral, David; Mertel, Adam; Hanák, Petr; Mertel, Ján; Ondrejka, Peter; Hampejs, Tomáš; and Shaw, Robert L. J. (2023). InkVisitor. Available online at: https://github.com/DISSINET/InkVisitor.
Zbíral, David; Shaw, Robert L. J.; Hampejs, Tomáš; & Mertel, Adam. (2022). Model the source first! Towards Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling and source criticism 2.0. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6963579
DISSINET has developed an interactive map of the occupations, dissident religious affiliations, and locations of residence of nearly 900 persons suspected of heresy in the inquisition register of Bologna, 1291–1310.
Building upon the invaluable work of modern editors, the DISSINET project is building a textual corpus of medieval inquisitorial material, which now contains 15 registers, totals over 1.6 million tokens, and ranges from North-Central Italy through Languedoc to England, and from the 1230s until the 1520s.
