Kathryne Beebe’s research in History and the Digital Humanities on the nature of religious devotion in late-medieval Europe comprises three major research projects: Mapping Observance, The Digital Observance Network, and Imagined Pilgrimage. She was also a co-investigator on the Spatial History Research Collaborative.
Together, these projects seek answers to three fundamental questions: 1) How can we use new technologies to gather, analyze, and interpret data from historical sources? 2) How can we use history to create sustainable communities? and 3) How can we use history in conjunction with other disciplines to understand the human condition and contribute to our collective well-being?
In 2016, Kathryne received two major grants from the University of Texas at Arlington to further the Digital Observance Network and the Mapping Observance project—with over $19,000 in funding from UTA’s College of Liberal Arts Digital Arts and Humanities (COLA DAH) Initiative grants. In 2018 and 2019, the Mapping Observance project was further supported with over $16,000 in funding from the Sonderforschungsbereich (Collaborative Research Center) 923: “Bedrohte Ordnungen” (“Threatened Orders”) at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, and by a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) Research Fellowship.
Mapping Observance
Mapping Observance uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping technologies to visualize the late-medieval social networks amongst religious institutions in what is now southwestern Germany. Big data exists for the Middle Ages; the problem for researchers has been accessing it. Scholars have found it difficult to work with data from the late-medieval and early-modern eras because useful information is buried in widely disparate sources, such as the archaeological record, religious texts, institutional histories, nineteenth-century scholarly catalogues, and twenty-first century digital databases. Therefore, the Mapping Observance project is developing new tools to locate, gather, process, and analyze previously un-aggregated data drawn from these and other sources. The focus of the immediate project is to use these tools to understand the social, economic, demographic, and environmental dimensions of the late-medieval religious reform effort known as the Observance Movement. However, the utility of the project extends well beyond this immediate goal. By designing an innovative tool that can gather and process historical big data, this research will provide other scholars with a unique instrument that can be applied in many different contexts to solve a multitude of other research questions. The Mapping Observance project forms a building block of Kathryne’s two other major research projects, both of which offer analyses of medieval urban living and ways of learning from the past, in order to understand the broad social and cultural fabric that conditions our lives even today. Funded in January 2016 by a $10,000 grant from the UTA College of Liberal Arts Digital Arts and Humanities Initiative, as part of the Spatial History Research Collaborative project. Kathryne was a co-investigator for this grant.
The Digital Observance Network
Saints Paul, John Chrysostom, and Basil by Carlo Crivelli, c. 1493. Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris, France. © Public Domain
The Digital Observance Network aims to establish an international, cross-disciplinary Digital Arts and Humanities (DAH) research network of Observance Movement scholars—a field that currently suffers a lack of knowledge-sharing and synthesis. A key goal is to create an integrative digital portal entitled VORsight: Visualizing Observant Reform in the Middle Ages and Beyond, which will incorporate present public-access medieval and early modern DAH projects and Observant reform scholarship into one location via three dynamic, interconnected features: 1) an interactive database of Observant monasteries; 2) a robust mapping visualization tool employing GIS technologies; and 3) a digital manuscript library. However, the tools created to address the lack of synthesis in the field will be useful for more than their substantial contribution to Observant reform studies. They would also set a standard for future integrative DAH projects that seek to move beyond the simple “digitized document website” model that currently dominates the field. In addition to this, the Digital Observance Network does not simply support the study of the Observance Movement in the late Middle Ages and in the Early Modern era. Since the Observance Movement was intimately bound up in urban religious communities, and the social, spiritual, and economic fabric of late-medieval European town life, a better understanding of Observant reform and urban renewal can help us more accurately place into context the changes wrought on the built, economic, cultural, spiritual and social environments, both in the past and today. Funded in January 2016 by a $9,070 grant from the UTA College of Liberal Arts Digital Arts and Humanities Initiative, Kathryne was Principal Investigator for this grant, along with the co-Principal Investigator, Prof. James Mixson of the University of Alabama. The Digital Observance Network can be found at: http://www.uta.edu/dah/digitalobservance, on Facebook at @DigitalObservance, and on Twitter at @DigiObservance.
Imagined Pilgrimage
Imagined Pilgrimage is a cross-disciplinary, monograph-length analysis of “virtual pilgrimage,” or contemplative travel to holy sites within the imagination, drawing upon the insights offered by the two Digital Humanities projects described above. This project proposes the first systematic, comparative study of enclosed religious women and men—and the laity—who engaged in this religious practice. Drawing on approaches from history, literature, anthropology, and the Digital Humanities, this project focuses on the social and cultural contexts of these devotions and the intellectual and religious networks that produced them. In contrast to previous studies largely focused only upon nuns, this project offers an original, comparative focus upon male and lay practitioners of virtual pilgrimage. The aim of this research is to understand the distribution of this type of institutional devotional practice within the general population of late-medieval Europe, and thereby know more about the relationships amongst forms of monastic devotion, religious reform, and lay piety just before the Reformation. By studying the nature of medieval perceptions of reality through virtual travel, and how the effects of those practices may have shaped our own contemporary ideas of it, we can achieve a better understanding of our perceptions of our own modern (and virtual) reality and the human condition we currently embody.
Spatial History Research Collaborative
The Spatial History Research Collaborative is a project at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) that seeks to promote the study and use of GIS technologies within the discipline of History, as well as to build research infrastructure in UTA’s College of Liberal Arts that can be scaled to incorporate other disciplines and additional faculty members. (January 2016–August 2016).