Posted by Thomas Hinton
11 August 2025Here at Exeter, we’re part of a wider community of medievalists across the so-called ‘GW4’ group, which brings together with specialists in medieval studies across Exeter, Bath, Bristol, and Cardiff. The very first post on this blog reported on the award of central funding from GW4 to help establish this community, and just over a decade later, we’re delighted to be able to report the latest success in securing central funding: a grant to develop new teaching and research methodologies in medieval studies surrounding digital humanities. ‘Medieval Studies Mobilising Digital Humanities‘ will run from September 2025, and this week, Tom Hinton — one of the co-leads on the project at Exeter — tells us what to expect, along with how to register for the first workshop.
Over the last few years, digital humanities have changed the field of medieval studies, and in particular have opened up new ways of looking at manuscripts and of asking the questions that we’ve always asked. In my recent project digitally editing Walter de Bibbesworth’s Tretiz, for instance, I’ve been able to present two manuscripts side-by-side to compare variants, or produce precise data on the frequency of glosses across different copies of the text.
Building on the many examples of digital humanities-inspired medievalist work in our area, we’re delighted to announce that medievalists at Exeter, in collaboration with colleagues at Bristol and Cardiff, have secured funding for a new project that will allow us to share our expertise and passion in a new forum. The core activities of this will be three workshops. The first, at Exeter (in September, on 15th September), has as its theme ‘manuscripts’; the second, at Cardiff (in October), will be based around ‘language and text’; and the third, at Bristol (in November) will focus on ‘mapping and databases’.
We’ll also be using the funding to explore how we can work together and find ways to launch new projects in collaboration with colleagues at Bristol and Cardiff, potentially looking at grant bids, conference panels, and so on. And we’re looking to embed into each institution’s seminar programme one joint seminar that would be a hybrid event with — at least initially — a digital humanities theme.
Registration for the Exeter workshop is now open, and anyone interested in attending is warmly encouraged to fill out the registration form and return it via email. If you’ve ever wondered how digital methods can complement your work around medieval manuscripts, this workshop is for you: we’ll be exploring everything from how to edit texts using XML through to the cutting-edge field of biocodicology – the sampling and analysis of protein and DNA from the parchment surface. We’ll also be hearing about how Exeter colleagues have collaborated on digital projects with Exeter Cathedral.
All of these areas of research are really exciting, but they also have something of a mystique about them, and medievalists may assume that they require deep experience or detailed technical expertise. That’s where these workshops come in. We’re keen to break down as many of the barriers to entry for medieval digital humanities as possible, by bringing in experts in the field who can share their knowledge and approaches — both on how to collect the data that comes with DH projects, and on what to do with it once you have it. The workshops will offer a fast-track to Digital Humanities competence for medievalists, and we hope, over the three workshops, to grow the ranks of ‘digital medievalists’ across the South-West.