On the eve of the one-year anniversary of hiring most of the RELEVEN project team, it’s a good time to look back at what we have accomplished and what is still ahead of us.
The first year has been all about setting up the structure for getting the project done. This means a lot of things! We have had to create a real data model out of the idea sketched in the original proposal. The core of the data model (the STAR model) is there now; we have been working hard over the last year to test it out in real live data situations, and finding adequate solutions for the issues and ambiguities that arise. How do we handle conflicting assertions, exactly? Can a single viewpoint contain assertions that conflict with each other? What happens when assertion A conflicts with assertion B, but we also have assertion C that can support either side?
For that matter, what constitutes an authority? Is a medieval author like William of Tyre an authority in his own right, or is ‘authority’ restricted to living people who are relying on the artefact – the history that bears his name – to make the claim? But then, if we impose a criterion like this, what do we do for scholars who are no longer alive but whose work was published in living memory? Okay then, what about scholars like Edward Gibbon or Mik‘ayel Čamčean, who wrote in the early modern period? Maybe it’s best to let William of Tyre be an authority after all...hm, in that case, what about anonymous and pseudonymous texts, or documents like land registers? Round and round we go...
Another important part of the structure is, of course, the specific plans for our three pillars of people, places, and texts. We have had a great start to the “people” strand of the project, largely thanks to the hard work of all those scholars who contributed to the Prosopography of the Byzantine World and the significant volume of data that has been produced. It goes without saying that, even though we didn’t have ready-made data to kick off with, the “places” and “texts” strands are just as important! Defining the specifics of the research questions we have, and setting up the vocabulary, modelling practices, and data needs to suit this will be the main work of the next couple of months.
Setting up the structure also means the structure of the day to day work, where the team members find their places within the group as well as their individual niches. For each of the scholars in the project, a harmony
needs to be found between following their actual research interests and making sure that this research contributes to the overall goals of the project, somehow. For the more technical scholars and staff, it has meant trying to build a system that will work, in time for everyone to be able to use it. And for the PI (hi), it has been quite a lesson in learning how to let go, to lead more than control, and to let go of the lingering feeling that all the ideas have to come from me. I have a great team with fine ideas and a lot of enthusiasm, and the project is already immeasurably stronger thanks to their ideas and initiatives.
