Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) (980-1037 CE), the renowned physician-philosopher and polymath, lived a life of nonstop writing and constant traveling. Organizing his scholarly works was a task initiated by his disciples, continued by medieval biobibliographers, and grappled with by modern historians of philosophy and science. In my doctoral project I am interested in two of his many fields of scholarship as well as the interaction between the two—namely celestial natural philosophy (celestial physics), and mathematical astronomy. Like my fellow medieval and modern historians of Ibn Sīnā’s corpora, I found his wanderlust and prolificacy a complicating factor in tracing his authorship in time and space. In a milieu of constant political turmoil, he wrote on a multitude of topics during his nonstop journey that took him from Central Asia to West Asia. For instance, Ibn Sīnā wrote different parts of some of his summae of philosophy, such as al-Shifāʾ (The book of healing), in different times and places. In my project I needed to establish a relationship between Ibn Sīnā’s works on the general physics, celestial physics, and astronomy to trace the development of his thought, and any major shifts in the key concepts of the two fields in his corpora over time. In this paper, I first show how, using ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS online, I resolved this complication by visualizing Ibn Sīnā journey and scholarly production as a multilayered, temporally dynamic map. In my doctoral research I also ask whether or not there was a correlation between the subject matters of Ibn Sīnā’s works and the places in which they were produced. Detection of such correlation in the case of his works on celestial physics and astronomy would open the way for my historical research to focus on the moments and places where he dedicated himself to these two topics to investigate the historical causes behind it—such as patronage, existing intellectual traditions, networks of local or regional scholars, teaching those subjects, etc. In the second part of my paper, I show how, the vector data that I produced in the process of mapping, allowed me to run a geospatial analysis on ArcGIS Insights to detect the times and places where Ibn Sīnā was active in the two abovementioned fields of knowledge, and to demonstrate the quantified extent of his intellectual production. In my presentation, I will outline and discuss the workflow behind my digital humanity project including data collection, thinking about a taxonomy for data organization, choice of platform, building a geodatabase with multiple layers, temporal data visualization, and geospatial data analysis.

How can DH projects can make more sustainable choices in their approach to labour, infrastructure, methods, and access? To address these questions, we discuss our shared experience spearheading the Dragoman Renaissance Research platform, a website dedicated to the study of dragomans (diplomatic interpreter-translators) and their role in mediating relations between the Ottoman Empire and its European neighbours from ca. 1550 to ca. 1730. This decade-long collaborative DH project co-led by digital-humanities researcher and historian Natalie Rothman and digital librarian Kirsta Stapelfeldt, features research outputs (long-form narratives, visualizations, multimedia presentations) as well as comprehensive structured datasets and digital surrogates of relevant archival records. Our ongoing work on this project has provided ample opportunities for tackling the challenges of online interoperability and sustainability, and for addressing complex research needs with limited resources.

Our presentation introduces the project’s underlying Islandora-based infrastructure and approach to team work, as well as the challenges and rewards of growing a multilingual project that centres multilingual, non-Eurocentric conceptual frameworks. First, we situate the project’s genesis in relation to the academic biographies of the co-PIs and the institutional context of the Digital Scholarship Unit (DSU) of the University of Toronto Scarborough Library. We explore the inherent tensions in the DSU’s mandate to provide extensive campus-specific DH support while limiting long-term maintenance challenges. For this project, this has meant prioritizing robust data modeling and core research and presentation functions over bespoke interfaces.

Next, we explore the project’s core datasets and the methods leveraged to draw together and describe materials from multiple, multilingual archival sources and years of secondary-source publications. The resulting, iterative data model is designed to engage with complex questions of knowledge production and circulation, including emergent and evolving genres of diplomacy and statecraft. Given the project’s focus on a nuanced understanding of understudied forms, sites, and agents of knowledge production, a high level of data complexity is essential to the project’s main questions. The project thus relies on the ability to faithfully render and query heterogeneous, partial data sources as well as their layered, plural organizational systems and complex interrelationships. We discuss the project’s current entity relationship structure and reflect on the complexity of the querying it aims to facilitate.

The project is designed to license datasets and analytical outputs as open access and to allow ongoing data additions over time. In the final segment of our presentation, we address how we seek to leverage best standards in the information science community for mobilizing knowledge and participating in the emerging web, and to forward the goal of building shared vocabularies for disambiguation, and by extension linking, the work of separate scholars and communities worldwide. Specifically, we address the suitability, benefits, and challenges of using Islandora for a complex DH research project, as well as the features and workflows that the DSU has developed to accommodate the needs of this project with an eye to their wider applicability and reusability in other contexts. The approach taken in this project may help others looking to address complex DH projects sustainably.

This paper focuses on the MA thesis work of two scholars: Kim Martin, now an Assistant Professor in History at the University of Guelph, and Thomas Smith, a Master’s student of the Tri-University program in History. Martin completed her Master’s in the same program in 2004 and is now Smith’s thesis supervisor. Both projects focus on the annual Lord Mayor’s Day Pageants in London, England during the early modern period, with Martin focusing on gendered representations of the city between 1585 and 1630 and Smith focusing on the physicality of the pageant performance during the 1616 Lord Mayor’s Show Chrysanaleia. The two foci mean, of course, that the research material will differ slightly, but both are largely building from the same primary sources and leaning on secondary literature that is similar in scope.

What has undeniably changed since 2004, however, is the research process: How we, as historians, conduct our searches, locate primary and secondary sources, and access archives (Solberg, 2012, Martin and Quan-Haase, 2016, Milligan, 2019). This paper will compare and contrast the academic journeys of Martin and Smith and will document these two historian’s experiences to demonstrate the rapidly changing environment of academic history research to benefit future digital historians. To demonstrate these differences, each author will reflect upon their methodology and results, taking the following into consideration:

• What are the effects of digital tools on the search and discovery process?
• Does digital infrastructure speed up historical research?
• What new questions do digital tools allow historians to answer?

Finally, this paper will discuss the difficulties of doing digital humanities work within an academic structure that predates it. While Martin’s thesis was in a traditional written format, Smith has been working on a 3D reconstruction of a pageant cart in the London street in order to understand how it may have been understood by contemporaries. The work expectations, length of the written thesis, and skills required for completion, however, have not changed much in 20 years. How can we ensure that the labour involved in a DH thesis gets recognized, and reimagine this process so the next generation of DH scholars doesn’t have to do double the work?

Works Cited

Martin, K. and Quan-Haase, A. (2016), "The role of agency in historians’ experiences of serendipity in physical and digital information environments", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 72 No. 6, pp. 1008-1026. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2015-0144

Milligan, Ian. History in the age of abundance?: How the web is transforming historical research. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019.

Munday, Anthony. “Chrysanaleia”. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/CHRY1.htm. Accessed May 05, 2022.

Solberg, Janine. "Googling the archive: Digital tools and the practice of history." Advances in the History of Rhetoric 15, no. 1 (2012): 53-76.