Initiatives & Ideas 

The potential of thinking about texts as spreadsheets/structured data and extracting information from accounting documents and other sources. The challenges in getting everyone to adopt common standards and data models.

The need to study imperfections, errors, and variations in manuscripts to understand craft practices and economic/environmental factors affecting production.

Building interdisciplinary collaborations and communities around shared data resources. Learning from initiatives like PAASTA in Proteomics,  that facilitate open data sharing among junior scholars.

Challenges in creating sustainable data infrastructures that persist beyond short project durations. The importance of common vocabularies, metadata standards and findable/accessible repositories.

Opportunities through research infrastructures like E-RIHS to access funding and services like imaging, material analysis across institutions. Coordinating these efforts for manuscript studies.

The critical mass of data required before new questions/analyses become possible in different fields. Identifying "irrational" patterns as cues for deeper investigation.

Balancing depth vs breadth when creating data catalogs/databases across large collections with limited resources. Incremental, non-threatening approaches to build resources.

Studying imperfections and variations in manuscript materials (parchment, inks, etc.) to understand geographical patterns, chronological changes, economic factors, and craft practices behind their production. This could integrate textual analysis with scientific analysis of materials.

Building an interdisciplinary project around animal husbandry, cattle management, and dairy production practices by combining textual sources, zooarchaeological evidence, isotopic analysis and environmental data across different regions and time periods like medieval Scandinavia, Iceland, and Greenland.

Investigating major climatic/environmental events like droughts, diseases etc. by correlating textual accounts, economic records and physical evidence across different regions to understand their wide-ranging impacts.

Coordinating efforts in material analysis of manuscripts through the E-RIHS research infrastructure, by partnering with institutions offering different analytical services (proteomics, imaging, microbiome etc.)

Building a centralized, sustainable catalogue/database for manuscript descriptions by incrementally starting with non-controversial samples and developing common standards and vocabularies.

Exploring how larger pools of structured data from texts enable new kinds of questions and analyses as "critical mass" is reached in different fields.