The DEEDS Project

From Brock University's Digital Humanities Compendium

A review by Stacey Morris, written for HIST 5V71 in Fall 2011

[edit] Review

The DEEDS Project at the University of Toronto has been a thirty year process for Professor Michael Gervers. DEEDS, which stands for Documents of Early England Dataset, was sparked out of a need for an easier method to date the thousands of surviving medieval land charters from the time of the Norman Conquest 1066 until the reign of Edward I in 1307 as the dating of charters between this period was quite rare. So far this project has examined over 9,000 charters from mostly England with a few from Wales.^[1] Gervers also recognized that in some cases charters did not survive in their original form, therefore using the traditional method of Paleography did not always apply. The project actually began in 1975 with the accumulation of around 1,500 charters and documents from the Great Cartulary of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem.^[2] In the early 1990s, Professor Gervers consulted with Michael Margolin in the Statistics department at the University of Toronto to begin working on a program which could work on dating charters using textual analysis, encoding that would be specific to Medieval Latin, and database storage.^[3] Initially the project was concerned with dating charters based on the following categories, names of those included in the charter, and the property and geographic location. The information that this project is able to provide Medieval scholars enables forms of analysis to occur at much faster rates and allows for new datasets to be compared and contrasted between one another.

The DEEDS program can be accessed two ways, first it can be accessed over the internet using a FTP (file transfer protocol) connected to the database server, or it can be accessed through computers that have the software installed. When a charter is run through the program three things occur, to put it simply, they are scanned, analyzed, and then stored. In more complex terms, the document is translated into digital format then put through a language recognition system which looks at word use and semantics using an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system, then the charter is encoded using an RDF (Resource Definition Framework) and XML (Extensive Markup Language) and then finally stored in a database.^[4] Then from the storage process more data is extracted when other charters are entered. The metadata that is produced is processed into a layering system developed especially for DEEDS which focuses on the chronological and geographic information, so that information is not overlapped. This layering system also is able to recognize how wording and handwriting had changed over time which helps to reveal information about law and society in Medieval England as the information now becomes a dataset. The use of the XML designed by Margolin presents the data into graphs which map patterns as well as place the information into hierarchies. Margolin and his team created a two tier system for the database which allows for the information to be searched and browsed.^[5]

As of 2008, the DEEDS project had two programs for identification and evaluation of twelfth and thirteenth-century charters. The first one is a Chronological Evaluation Program and the second is a Scribal Identification Program that looks at two algorithms which analyze the styles of word usage as well as the handwriting itself.^[6] It is also worth noting that for those charters which survive in their original format, a digital image of the charter is taken using a SVG (Scalable Computer Graphics) program to ensure that the image of the charter is not distorted.^[7] The DEEDS method of analyzing charters to determine their dates and authorship demonstrates that the digital world can replace traditional ways of analyzing written sources from the past on a much larger scale.

One thing that is made clear on the DEEDS website is that this program is not an archive which can be confusing for users who are not looking for a specific charter or cartulary. Due to the fact that this program is designed for a specific purpose, the dating of twelfth and thirteenth century English charters, it’s quite limited in what it can do for researchers outside that area of study. It would be interesting to see if the same software applications could be utilized to create other document analysis programs for documents from different periods or written in other languages. This program is also a great way to consolidate datasets from these charters and once again in my opinion it would be useful if other databases existed to store documents regardless of their ownership.

It is worth noting here the Brock connection to DEEDS because it demonstrates the practical application of how the program works but also that it has been successful at being a valuable research tool. In the fall of 2008, a medieval charter was found during a clean out of our Special Collections and Archives. It had been there since 1976 and was essentially forgotten about which meant that little information was actually known about the document itself and its origin. After a translation of the Latin, it was revealed that the charter was a land grant from one Robert de Clopton of Warwickshire to his son, William, but there is no date mentioned. Upon hearing about this discovery, Professor Gervers contacted Brock about running this charter through his DEEDS program to see if they could possibly date it and also see if any of the language use or handwriting style may coincide with other charters in the database. By first running Brock’s charter through the Chronological Evaluation Program, it was able to be determined that this document was dated 1241 plus or minus two years.^[8] It is also worth mentioning that the document had been examined the old fashioned way, Paleography as well, and was dated around the same time.

Brock’s Clopton Charter was also run through the Scribal Identification Program and it was compared to all other charters in the DEEDS database from the Warwickshire area from around the same time. As a result it was determined that one Nicholas the clerk whose name is present at the bottom of Brock’s Clopton Charter is 92% also likely to have written another charter from the same area.^[9]

The DEEDS Project despite being user friendly and accessible while being understood by a general user, offers a window into looking at medieval documents from a different perspective by placing them in a larger database. The website in general is quite confusing and does not explain that the search options require your search word or phrase to be in Latin. Therefore, the user really has to know what they are looking for as it also does not provide translations for the charters that are in the database. Nevertheless, DEEDS offers not only Medievalists a new way of dealing with an old problem (dating charters), but also demonstrates how far and how much further the Digital world can go. The fact that Gervers and Margolin were able to create software to suit their particular needs (dating charters as well as scribal identity) successfully shows that the study of history is definitely more enriched through the use of technology.

[edit] Notes and References

1. ↑ “The DEEDS Project”, University of Toronto, accessed November 10, 2011, http://res.deeds.utoronto.ca:49838/research/
2. ↑ Ibid.
3. ↑ Ibid.
4. ↑ Michael Gervers & Michael Margolin, “Managing Metadata in a Research Collection of Medieval Latin Charters,” The DEEDS Project University of Toronto, http://res.deeds.utoronto.ca, accessed November 11, 2011
5. ↑ Ibid.
6. ↑ Ibid.
7. ↑ Ibid.
8. ↑ A. Basson, A. McDonald, D. Sharon & A. Somerville, “A Thirteenth-Century English Charter at Brock University,” (Forthcoming), 7.
9. ↑ Ibid., 8.

[edit] Bibliography

Basson, Andre, R. Andrew McDonald, David Sharon, and Angus Somerville. “A Thirteenth-Century English Charter at Brock University,” (Forthcoming).

Gervers, Michael and Michael Margolin. ““Managing Metadata in a Research Collection of Medieval Latin Charters,” The DEEDS Project University of Toronto, http://res.deeds.utoronto.ca, accessed November 11, 2011.

The University of Toronto. “The DEEDS Project.” http://res.deeds.utoronto.ca:49838/research/