The *Making of Charlemagne’s Europe (MKCHEUR, eISBN is 978-1-912466-28-3) is a major digital humanities initiative that brings together dispersed early medieval legal documents into a unified, searchable, and methodologically rigorous database. The project addresses both practical and scholarly challenges: charters from the reign of Charlemagne are scattered across numerous archives and vary widely in form, transmission, and regional tradition, making comparison difficult. By creating a single data framework capable of extracting, harmonising, and comparing prosopographical and socio‑economic information, the project enables scholars to investigate political, social, and economic structures across the Carolingian world with far greater precision. At its core, the project required the design of bespoke data models, the development of a robust database architecture, and the creation of tools for faceted browsing, mapping, and complex querying, ensuring both methodological transparency and long‑term sustainability. RSE expertise was essential for handling heterogeneous historical data, building workflows for data ingestion and validation, and supporting historians in framing reproducible digital research methods.
Team
- Alice Rio Principal investigator, FAH Department of History
- Edward Roberts Researcher, FAH Department of History
- Gianmarco de Angelis Researcher, FAH Department of History
- Ginestra Ferraro Research Software Designer
- Janet Nelson Co-Investigator, FAH Department of History
- John Bradley Co-Investigator, FAH Department of Digital Humanities
- Luís Figueira Researcher, FAH Department of Digital Humanities
- Mary Chester-Kadwell KDL Research Software Engineer
- Mary Chester-Kadwell KDL Research Software Engineer]
- Neil Jakeman KDL Research Software Analyst
- Rachel Stone Researcher, FAH Department of History