Blog
Meeting with GGAT
As well as the meeting with Swansea Council (see Catherine's post), Keith and I had a meeting with Neil Maylan and Charina Jones of Gwent and Glamorgan Archaeological Trust.
Swansea Council meeting: planning the pavement markers
On Thursday 13 June, Keith, Gareth and I attended a meeting at Swansea City Council, organised by Gareth Hughes, the Council’s Regeneration Co-ordinator. Our aim was to discuss the pavement marker project and how our research can link with various other exciting conservation, regeneration and heritage projects in the city.
From texts to maps (and back again)
One of the principal digital humanities challenges of our project lies in reconciling all the different types of mapping activity that we need to undertake. As well as the literal mapping of physical space and the urban landscape to help us develop a historically accurate sense of Swansea at a particular moment in time, we must also figuratively map textual references in the witness statements to concepts (such as places, people, events), and we must also do so in way which preserves the chronology of what the individual witnesses recorded. We also need to try and achieve this within a single technical architecture that will allow us to bring together the textual edition and the GIS data that the other members of the team have been working hard at compiling.
Layering space and time
One of the great advantages of using a Geographical Information System (GIS) in mapping urban landscapes is that it allows us to layer space and time, to see how towns and cities have changed over time.
Mapping medieval Swansea
Swansea has undergone many changes in terms of its layout of streets and buildings. The challenge for the project is to recreate the topography of medieval Swansea to aid the understanding of the Cragh text witness statements.
