Michael Gervers

Dating medieval English charters

Deeds, or charters, dealing with property rights, provide a continuous documentation which can be used by historians to study the evolution of social, economic and political changes. This study is concerned with charters (written in Latin) dating from the tenth through early fourteenth centuries in England. Of these, at least one million were left undated, largely due to administrative changes introduced by William the Conqueror in 1066. Correctly dating such charters is of vital importance in the study of English medieval history. This paper is concerned with computer-automated statistical methods for dating such document collections, with the goal of reducing the considerable efforts required to date them manually and of improving the accuracy of assigned dates. Proposed methods are based on such data as the variation over time of word and phrase usage, and on measures of distance between documents. The extensive (and dated) Documents of Early England Data Set (DEEDS) maintained at the University of Toronto was used for this purpose.

Distance Measures and Smoothing Methodology for Imputing Features of Documents

We suggest a new class of metrics for measuring distances between documents, generalizing the well-known resemblance distance. We then show how to combine distance measures with statistical smoothing to develop techniques for imputing missing features of documents. We treat in detail the case where these features are continuous variates, but we note that our methods can be adapted to settings where the features are ordered or unordered categorical variates (e.g., the names of potential authors of the documents). The results of applying our ideas to the dating of medieval manuscripts are briefly summarized.

Medieval Charters and the Computer: An Analysis Using Mark IV

Publisher Summary Experience shows that the bulk of quantitative material in charters and other legal sources can be entered in the computer. The great advantage of this tool is that when properly programmed, it can sort and reproduce information in an endless variety of combinations. It can do nothing that the historian has not already attempted by manual means, but it is capable of organizing in minutes what, if done by hand, could take anywhere from days to years. Methods of historical research tend to change slowly, particularly in fields such as medieval studies where the historian must frequently invest a large amount of his time gathering, transcribing, and organizing documentation. It is gratifying to see that some scholars have taken the bit between the teeth and adapted the computer to their needs. But in the short time that they have been utilized, improvements in computer design and capacity have advanced so quickly that projects that would have been clumsy if not next to impossible a decade ago are now quite feasible. One such improvement in computer language is Mark IV, a general-purpose file management system. An advantage of Mark IV for social scientists and students of the humanities not intent upon the sole pursuit of statistical analysis is that it allows one to enter alphabetic codes where previous systems, for financial or organizational reasons, encouraged or demanded the reduction to numeric codes of information to be entered in the machine. Probably the first attempt to analyze medieval charters by Mark IV is Documents of Essex England Data Set.

Medieval charters and the computer: An analysis using Mark IV

Publisher Summary Experience shows that the bulk of quantitative material in charters and other legal sources can be entered in the computer. The great advantage of this tool is that when properly programmed, it can sort and reproduce information in an endless variety of combinations. It can do nothing that the historian has not already attempted by manual means, but it is capable of organizing in minutes what, if done by hand, could take anywhere from days to years. Methods of historical research tend to change slowly, particularly in fields such as medieval studies where the historian must frequently invest a large amount of his time gathering, transcribing, and organizing documentation. It is gratifying to see that some scholars have taken the bit between the teeth and adapted the computer to their needs. But in the short time that they have been utilized, improvements in computer design and capacity have advanced so quickly that projects that would have been clumsy if not next to impossible a decade ago are now quite feasible. One such improvement in computer language is Mark IV, a general-purpose file management system. An advantage of Mark IV for social scientists and students of the humanities not intent upon the sole pursuit of statistical analysis is that it allows one to enter alphabetic codes where previous systems, for financial or organizational reasons, encouraged or demanded the reduction to numeric codes of information to be entered in the machine. Probably the first attempt to analyze medieval charters by Mark IV is Documents of Essex England Data Set.