[MUSIC] Welcome to week five, so we're close to the end of our course now. And we're going to start a transition a bit from specifically, medieval European history. And now start to look at two elements of where history is going today. Specifically, we're going to look at this one area called Digital Humanity and I'm just introducing it, just in this video. What are the digital humanities? Well, today we're really not sure, isn't that funny? It means a lot of things to a lot of people. So the humanities as we can appreciate, is this investigation at issues relaying tart. Philosophy, history, literature, those are the classical humanities and where were those developed. They're developed during middle ages as part of the scholastic tradition. And we continue them today in our universities across the world. Now, what's quite interesting is, okay if those are the humanities that I while I am a humanist. Now if we add this word in front of it, digital, what does that mean? Well the digital humanities is, actually you are a digital humanist, you are participating in a massive online course that is delivered through the internet using this technology. That is a type of digital humanities. It is also other areas that really interesting that which is we're used to representing information through books, through text or even through electoral right? So what's new here is the appreciation that we have new types of mediums that we can use to communicate information and to analyze the information. So in the digital humanities we often use big data. So, we start to collect lots and lots of details from manuscripts and your accumulate those details into databases. And from those databases we can start to look at weekly large trends. For instance you can start to ask the question of like for instance we know that a pound of bacon cost this much in this city but then is that the norm? And as you start you accumulate this databases with all kinds of information. We get a sense of yeah that's very common to pay that amount. Or no they don't even sell bacon in these other places or they charge, they never sold bacon, they actually just traded for it. And so that's kind of one of the interesting things is that we start to evaluate information to relationship to other areas. That kind of contextualization of data is really important. Another way that we can look at the digital humanities is in terms of representation. And I'm particularly interested in this in the context of visualization. And so we will present something just a minute, I'll save up for a moment. So this medieval humanities and this week really kind of starts that process of medieval humanities. First, we're going to a look at what is palaeography? Say, what is, first off what is that word and two, how is that anything to do related with technology? Well paleography, first off, just introduce the idea, is the study of ancient handwriting. So it can be ancient during the Roman period or Greek period or the Medieval period or even today. It could be studying your grandparents' handwriting. So that's the type of paleography, so it is the study of handwriting, and it also is the actual handwriting itself. And what we'll be able to do in this context of the middle ages this week is I'm going to show you an example of 13th century handwriting from Castile, from Leon. Castile and Leon kingdom in Spain and it is actually a privilege that is granted from a Castilian king to a monastery. And it's specifically lands and mills and things like that that are granted to this monastery so that it can function. Our main purpose in looking this manuscript this week is just to kind of show you, what does a 13th Century handwriting look like. And you'll get to see elements of how A's, B's, and C's are written. And what's really quite exciting about this kind of gothic script, is it's very, very readable and you start to get an appreciation. Wow this is, maybe we share more in common with these folks than we thought in this historical period. That there were those commonalities of handwriting and things like that. But also what's really interesting about paleography and somewhere I do a lot of my work in my other Mooc courses. That you'll find across the internet is how we can use paleography, the study of this handwriting to make new discovery. And we will present to you some of those discoveries that we've made on the inside of revealing cooperation complex projects work on virtual placentiec. Medieval world and we look at this little city in Western Spain during the 12, 13, 14 and 15, and a little bit of 16th century where you have a broad time period. But we'll show you one story from the 1500's where, by evaluating manuscripts, we can see how Jews and Christians interlated with each other. And specifically, relating to one little neighborhood known as Lamota and how one day in this little city a bunch of corporate had been transferred and have that occurred. So you read an account of it but more interestingly I think is you get to watch visualization we have worked alongside of a game designers, geographers. Computer scientist and other historians to prepare this digital narrative to show you literally down to the clothing they wore at the time period, it's accurate. Down to a geographically specific zone that is accurately mapped for you to appreciate. Just like reading how individuals interrelated with each other, so you'll get to see that visualization. It's hosted on Coursera but also you can see a higher resolution version directly on YouTube and we have that link for you. So I hope you enjoyed this week as you start to investigate these digital humanities. And then also explore a little bit of palaeography see if it wets your taste because we have a couple of tricks up our sleeve along the way in future courses. And I think that's it, so have a great week and good to see you again.
