Paradox of Medieval Scotland (PoMS)

Project start date: 2007-09 Project end date: 2010-11
The period between 1093 and 1286 laid the foundations for modern Scotland. At its start, the king of Scots ruled no more than a small east coast realm between Lothian and Moray. At its end, his authority extended over the whole area of modern Scotland apart from the Northern Isles. During the same period, Scotland’s society and culture was transformed by the king implanting a new nobility of Anglo-Norman origin and establishing English influenced structures of law and government. Rees Davies observed of Scotland that ‘paradoxically, the most extensively English-settled and Anglicised part of the British Isles was the country which retained its political independence’ (The First English Empire, 170). As a part of the research a structured prosopography of Medieval Scotland has been created based around an extensive harvesting of data from legal charters of the period. This database is available for searching via the WWW.
Subject domains: 
Era(s): 
Country/region(s): 
Methods usedCategory
Accessibility analysisStrategy and project management
Resource sharingCommunication and collaboration
Cataloguing and indexingData structuring and enhancement
Coding and standardisationData structuring and enhancement
CollatingData analysis
CollocatingData analysis
Content analysisData analysis
Data modellingData structuring and enhancement
Iterative designStrategy and project management
PrototypingStrategy and project management
Record linkagesData analysis
Searching and queryingData analysis
Server scriptingData publishing and dissemination
Version controlStrategy and project management
Textual interaction (asynchronous)Communication and collaboration
Usability analysisStrategy and project management
Web browser scriptingData publishing and dissemination
preservationStrategy and project management
Collaborative publishingData publishing and dissemination
General website developmentData publishing and dissemination
General project managementStrategy and project management
Audio-visual interaction (synchronous)Communication and collaboration
Use of existing digital dataData capture
Manual input and transcriptionData capture
Funding sources: 
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Content types created: 
Dataset/structured data, Text
Software tools used: 
MySQL, Django, Oxygen XML Editor
Source material used:  
Mainly published sources for over 6000 medieval Scottish charters made in the names of kings, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, knights, burgesses and others provided source data. Data was harvested from these charters and put into a "factoid-oriented" structured prosopographical database.
Digital resource created:  
The prosopographical research resulted in a structured database that is searchable using a facetted browsing method over the WWW. Auxilary textual documents surround the resource. A particular auxilary textual research output is the "Feature of the Month": short articles which allow new thinking and recognise problems and other items of interest that arose from the research.
Access to digital resource:  
Open Access
Data Formats created: 
MySQL Database; XML
Harvesting into online data entry forms of information found in the printed sources.
Metadata standards employed: 
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), Other
Publications:  
Hammond, Matthew (ed) (2011). The Paradox of Medieval Scotland, 1093-1286. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer (forthcoming).

Institutions affiliated with this project: 

UK HE institutions involved:
King's College London
University of Glasgow
University of Edinburgh


Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record
Author(s) of recordJohn Bradley
TitleParadox of Medieval Scotland (PoMS)
Record created2010-11-17
Record updated2010-11-17 16:52
URL of recordhttp://www.arts-humanities.net/node/4214
Citation of recordJohn Bradley: Paradox of Medieval Scotland (PoMS).
<http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/4214>
created: 2010-11-17, last updated 2010-11-17 16:52