Showcase

In order to test the prototype as it's being developed, we've documented the two procedures surrounding the beliefs of Anne Askew - her Heresy Inquest, and Heresy Trial. The two were very different procedures, the former a vestige of the medieval church's judicial system, while the later a new invention arising from Henry VIII's departure from allegiance to Rome with the establishment of a national church. The Inquest took place in the Court of the Bishop of London; the Trial, before Privy Council. The ways the two events are described and analyzed by historians, and how they appear in historical sources, details the way nanohistorical methods allow us to understand the two as legal processes, but also the historiography of Askew's torture and eventual burning at the stake in 1546.

Below are a series of visualizations of the Askew data. There are over 2950 nanohistories involved. Storing them as a network allows us to see how historical phenomena are complex groupings of assertions of what happened, from a range of sources and discussants or scholars. But we can also extract and represent the network - and importantly pathways and slices, or sub-networks, as needed. And we don't need to view the data itself as a network. We can transform it or our selection from it in any number of ways. Perhaps most importantly, because the data shares the same structure and format, it's also commensurate, or comparable. Meaning we can look at different representations of the same historical phenomena as distinct discursive or narrative networks. We can put the episodes into a sequence, or examimine the verbs used (which gives us a sense of how historians and sources 'characterize' an episode). Nanohistories open up history-as-data to well grounded and tried computational tools and techniques. But they also allow us to think about other ways of looking at historical representation and narrative.

This example shows how Felicity Heal mentions and discusses various elements of the Reformation in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in her 2000 monograph The Reformation in Britain and Ireland. We can trace what historical phenomena are regarded to be parts of others, and what these parts entail or how they're described by historians in her discussion.