PREVIOUS RESEARCH
As I mentioned previously, my research interests focus mainly on the various facets of medieval medical pilgrimage. Part of my master's thesis--which I plan to finish Spring 2015--will include a digital humanities component. I have spent the past year or so working (in an on and off manner) on digital maps. My first maps trace the routes taken by Margery Kempe in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. An English woman, she traveled throughout Europe all the way to the Holy Land. Reading about a person's travels is one thing--we know through reading books such as The Travels of Marco Polo that people in the Middle Ages traveled vast distances. But seeing the routes on a map is a different experience. I learned this firsthand when I presented my map to my colleagues in Fall 2013. Even though several of them had heard of Margery Kempe and knew how far she had traveled, they were still surprised to see the distance depicted on a map (I recall hearing exclamations such as "Wow!" and "Oooh!").
In Fall 2013 I used Google Maps to create the web based map for Margery's pilgrimage route. This semester I took that map and plugged it into Google Earth and QGIS.
For my thesis I would like to plot points that denote which shrines and saints medieval pilgrims visited depending on their illness. There are several extant records detailing the kinds of miraculous healing that occurred at various shrines such as those of Thomas of Canterbury, Godric of Finchale, and William of Norwich.
Plotting these points on a map is certainly another way of presenting data that is already available in books and manuscripts. Looking at the points on a map gives the viewer a better idea of exactly where popular shrines were. They can see what areas tended to have more shrines, or where the "hot spots" were, like Jerusalem, Rome, or Santiago de Compostela. Likewise, they can also see where there relatively few shrines or none at all. This visualization would help explain why people from certain areas would travel to Canterbury or other popular shrines. If you'd like more information about my project on Margery Kempe, please get in touch with me via email or Twitter.
