After it was hardly possible to attend conferences in person for the last two years due to the pandemic, we are all the more pleased that this is finally possible again. For the RELEVEN team, this year's conference season kicked off with the International Medieval Congress 2022. The conference, which has been taking place since 1994, is the largest of its kind in Europe and receives an average of 2700 medievalists (https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/about/about-the-imc/) each year.
Katalin Prajda (session 519, paper:Re-Evaluating Medieval Trieste: Cultural Exchanges in the Borderlands), Lewis Read (session: 625, paper: Dayeaks: Fostering in Early Medieval Armenia, 5th-7th Centuries) and Aleksandar Anđelović (session: 1541, paper: Friendly Consolation, Religiosity, or Irony?: Michael Psellos' Letter to Blinded Romanos IV Diogenes) each presented individual papers in various sessions of the hybrid event.
In addition, the RELEVEN team was able to organize its own session. This was titled "Re-Evaluating the 11th Century with Structured Assertion Records (STAR) (1701)". The three papers in the session focused primarily on the RELEVEN project's data model using STAR and its application in various fields of the Digital Humanities. Carla Ebel's paper "Bringing the STAR Model to Life: Data Mapping for the 11th Century" gave an introduction to data modeling and ontologies in general and the STAR Model in particular. Tara Andrews then presented its application in the field of prosopography in her talk "The STAR Model for Prosopography: Expressions of Uncertainty, Authority, and Conflict in the Prosopography of the Byzantine World". Thirdly, Márton Rósza spoke about the application in the field of archaeology in his lecture " The STAR Model for Archaeology: Mapping Conflicting Interpretations at Arpadian-Age Burial Grounds in Austria''.
The three presentations were followed by a lively discussion with many important questions and comments from the audience, for which we would like to thank everyone who participated. If you are interested you can have a look at the entire program of the IMC2022 at https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2021/01/Programme-22.pdf.
Being hybrid, this year’s IMC offered multiple opportunities for networking and scientific exchange, but also to meet old colleagues and friends from all over the world as well as to cultivate new contacts. The project team also got to know each other better at the congress, finishing off a productive week with our joint dinner in the city center of Leeds.
The entire team would like to take this opportunity to express their sincere gratitude to the organizers of the congress and all session organizers. We are already looking forward to the IMC2023 and will be represented there with several RELEVEN centered sessions.
