“The venomes doo preserve from diseases”

I am currently finishing a manuscript that explores late medieval and early modern medical literature on poison. I describe how fourteenth-century physicians created a new genre of medical literature dedicated to understanding the nature and properties of poison, and how these authors did not merely list dangerous drugs and remedies (as is usually assumed), but formulated a range of definitions of ‘poison’ and debated whether it had an ontological existence apart from other drugs. I argue that, although the initial interest in poison came from interest in understanding drug action generally, plague treatises that used the notion of poison to understand such a virulent disease brought new impetus to understanding the nature of poison itself. Sixteenth-century poison tracts further explore poison’s role in disease and contagion even more broadly, making the genre far more relevant to medical history than has been realized. Because poison literature seamlessly spans the domains of natural philosophy, natural history, pharmacology, pharmacy, and etiology, it provides a unique perspective on the development of medical thinking and forces us to rethink the history of toxicology.

My research interests range widely over the intersection of natural philosophy, medicine, and the human body during the medieval and early modern periods. My next project will investigate how processes of change, like corruption and fermentation, were used to describe both physical processes of change and disease inside the human body. Were these terms used different depending on whether the context was alchemical transformation, a diseased body, or physical decay? Did these separate contexts influence each other?

Reframing the Victorians

With funding from one of the twelve Google Digital Humanities Grants, Dan Cohen and I are exploring the massive corpus of Victorian literature held at Google Books in order to reevaluate and complicate the traditional stereotypical characterizations of the Victorians. The vast digital library of Google Books presents for the first time the possibility that we can conduct a comprehensive survey of Victorian writing—not just the well-known Mills and Carlyles, but tens of thousands of lesser-known or even forgotten authors—to see if the Victorians truly did use the kinds of words and phrases that Houghton in his seminal The Victorian Frame of Mind thought were indicative of their character. Did metaphors of light actually increase in real terms between 1830 and 1870, or was this only true for the dozen prominent writers he chose to focus on in his chapter on optimism? Will a more complex picture emerge from the comprehensive index of Google Books as we study changing word use over time? (with Dan Cohen, CHNM).

Digging Into Data: Criminal Intent

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey provide a glimpse into almost 200k trials at London’s central criminal court over a period of 240 years. Historians have tended to approach this collection by sifting through the documents one at a time, using unusual or compelling stories to illustrate social, cultural or intellectual histories. The Criminal Intent project demonstrates the potential roles for text mining in historical practice, showing that greater historical rigor can be achieved, and new insights gained, by moving from a single trial or narrow run of relevant examples to an analysis of statistically significant textual patterns found in this source as a single, massive whole. In addition to the Old Bailey Proceedings, our work builds on the successes of Zotero virtual collections, TAPoR and Voyeur analytics.

Metadata Improvement VIA Mapping (MIVIAM)

Creating digital ad-hoc maps for historical research has never been easier, yet the historian faces a number of practical problems when visualizing data in space and time. Messy, non-standardized data as well as shifting historical placenames and political boundaries, to name just a few, complicate the process considerably. This project extends a prototype (initially funded by the Mellon Foundation) to make it even easier to map historical data and clean it up in the process. MIVIAM geolocates placenames and creates a KML file so that the information contained in the database can be readily mapped and visualized. More importantly, MIVIAM’s rich user interface facilitates metadata correction by researchers. By allowing users to map specific sets of data—about which they have expertise—they can easily recognize and correct problems with metadata, thus improving their maps for individual research, but also making the data much more useful for everyone else at the same time. I’ve written a bit more about the research team’s experience.

ScholarPress

Most online education tools remain far too closed, proprietary, and complex for most of the essential tasks that scholars need to do on a daily basis. This project with create a suite of focused plug-ins for the ubiquitous blogging platform WordPress to help humanities teachers and researchers create syllabi, course websites, and display bibliographies. The primary goal is to provide freedom, flexibility, and a low-barrier to entry to using technology in  teaching and research without the restrictions of monolithic, expensive, and proprietary software.

Mapping Materia Medica

This project proposes to create and encourage use of a collaborative workspace to help scholars catalog and cross-reference the myriad materia medica of the medieval and early modern worlds. The many languages, transliterations, name variants, and varieties of contexts in which plant names appear, make traditional print publications wholly unsuitable for a developing a comprehensive and enduring concordance. Instead, such a project requires new tools and methods to allow scholars working with these materials (and who have the expertise to decipher them) to connect data about them. A collective and interdisciplinary effort will help us understand how scientific and medical knowledge of plants and their uses were influenced by their traversing geographical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. It will extend modern herbaria backward to gain a much more comprehensive view of natural history.

Tracing Medieval Knowledge Flows

As the Greco-Arabic learned tradition was translated into Latin via a few translation centers, it spread rapidly through burgeoning universities and other centers of learning. New textual discoveries and intellectual frameworks fueled knowledge production at increasing rates. Scholars of early universities, intellectual historians, and anyone interested in the transfer of knowledge and knowledge networks have asked many questions about the big picture of late medieval learning. But traditional scholarship tends to disperse and confine its analysis of libraries, university statutes, and individual scholars to rather inaccessible scholarly monographs. As a result, we really have no bird’s-eye view of textual transmission during this crucial period of intellectual growth that was foundational for the modern West.