DPP Newsletter March 2016

Digitising Patterns of Power
Newsletter No.1 / March 2016

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Colleagues,

The project "Digitising Patterns of Power (DPP): Peripherical Mountains in the Medieval World" has entered its second year with several highlights, on which you can find further information below. DPP has been awarded a cluster of four sessions at the International Medieval Congress (IMC) 2016 in Leeds. Moreover, we will strengthen our scholarly cooperation with South-East Europe by hosting a guest researcher from the University of Belgrade. In addition, we aim at incorporating data on climate and its history into our database and have therefore established links to a group of experts in the fields of Climatology, Climate Dynamics and Climate Change at the Justus Liebig University Gießen.

Please feel free to consult our web page at dpp.oeaw.ac.at for further information, which will be relaunched with new interesting features in April 2016, and also if you would like to subscribe or unsubscribe to this newsletter.

We wish you nice and pleasant Easter holidays!

Yours sincerely,
the DPP team

Save the Date – IMC Leeds, 5 July 2016

We are very much looking forward to our first scholarly highlight in the year 2016. Four out of four sessions of the DPP team have been accepted by the organisers of the International Medieval Congress (IMC) in Leeds (4-7 July 2016).
They will take place on Tuesday, 5 July 2016, from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. in the St. George Room / University House (Session Numbers 503, 603, 703, 803).

Our sessions are as follows:

Session DPP I – Lordship, Landscape and Agriculture in Medieval Mountain Regions (chair: Prof. Dr. Walter Pohl, Director of the IMAFO)
Session DPP II – Frontier, Contact Zone or No Man’s Land? The Morava-Thaya Region from the Early to the High Middle Ages (chair: Prof. Dr. Jiří Macháček)
Session DPP III – Flocks, Farms and Frontiers (chair: Doz. Dr. Mihailo Popović)
Session DPP IV – Reconstructing Historical Landscapes: Conceptualization, Mapping and Geocommunication (chair: Dr. Stefan Eichert)

Please consult the homepage of the organisers of the IMC Leeds 2016 for further details:
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ims/imc/imc2016.html

Visiting Scholar joining DPP
for Two Months

In 2015 the application of Mrs. Marija Vasiljević MA, a PhD student in the field of Medieval Studies at the Department of History of the University of Belgrade, for a two-month scholarship of the Scholarship Foundation of the Republic of Austria (Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education & Research, OeAD-GmbH) has successfully been supported by Mihailo Popović. Mrs. Vasiljević will join the Team Institute for Medieval Research (Austrian Academy of Sciences) from 1 April 2016 until 31 May 2016 and cooperate closely with Mihailo Popović and David Schmid on the medieval Slavonic charters concerning Case Study no. 3 [The Historical Region of Macedonia (12th–14th Cent.) – The Transformation of a Medieval Landscape]. She holds a position of Research Fellow as a scholarship holder at the Department of History in Belgrade.

Currently, she is working on her PhD-thesis entitled "The Late Medieval Cults of Saints in the Central Balkans”. Her main research interests are cultural history, medieval ideology, veneration of saints, medieval historiography and social memory. She published two articles with the titles "Mentions of Ancestors in Nemanjić Charters and Legitimization of Power” as well as "The Emergence of Serbian Genealogies and Chronicles as a Consequence of Political and Social Changes” in the peer-reviewed journal "Initial. A Review of Medieval Studies”. Moreover, Mrs. Vasiljević intends to work on the subject of the role of cults in the creation of collective identity whilst being in Vienna.

DPP contributes to Research on
Climate Change in the Middle Ages

In February 2016 Mihailo Popović was invited to the International conference entitled "The Crisis of the 14th Century: 'Teleconnections' between Environmental and Societal Change?" at the Istituto Storico Germanico in Rome, which was organised by Prof. Dr. Gerrit J. Schenk (Technische Universität Darmstadt) and Dr. Martin Bauch (Istituto Storico Germanico). He gave a paper with the title “Did the Little Ice Age have an Observable Impact on the Southern Balkan Peninsula in the First Half of the 14th Century?", which is based on data deriving from his DPP-case study “The Historical Region of Macedonia (12th-14th Cent.): The Transformation of a Medieval Landscape".

A cooperation with Prof J. Luterbacher, PhD, the Director of the Department of Geography at the Justus Liebig University of Gießen and Chair for Climatology, Climate Dynamics and Climate Change, has been established. Prof. Luterbacher will meet the DPP team in April 2016 to present his scholarly results, discuss issues of data quality, data evaluation, uncertainties and statistical methods, which will be of crucial help for DPP, since it is envisaged to try to include climate proxies into the DPP research question and database.

New Publication Series:
"Studies in Historical Geography and Cultural Heritage"

Accompanying to the project DPP, Mihailo Popović has initiated a scholarly collaboration with the publishing house Akademska Knjiga in Novi Sad and has founded a new peer-reviewed publication series as chief editor entitled “Studies in Historical Geography and Cultural Heritage”. This series aims at exploring new methods and theories in the Historical Geography of Byzantium and adjacent areas as well as at discussing new thoughts and ideas within the disciplines of Historical Geography and Digital Humanities (GIS; HGIS), Archaeology, Environmental Studies, Paleobotany, and Paleozoology of the Mediterranean World, and their influence on existing methodologies. The first volume of the new series will be entitled “The Urban and Sacred Topography of Prilep – a Byzantine Town in the Balkans” and is due to be published in the second half of 2016. Please feel free to consult the following link for further details:
http://dpp.oeaw.ac.at/histgeo/.