Posts on Digital Old Norse Studies

Coffee Meeting March 2026

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:00:00 +0100

TODO: Add description of the coffee meeting.

Annual Board Meeting 2025

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 11:00:00 +0100

TODO: Add description of the board meeting.

Digital and Computational Paleography

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 14:00:00 +0100

TODO: Add description of the workshop.

Annual Board Meeting 2024

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 15:30:00 +0100

Date and Time

The Board Meeting will be held on Zoom on December 20 at 11 am CET (10 am GMT). The Zoomlink will be sent out beforehand.

Agenda

Welcome
Deciding on a minute taker
Agenda and potential addenda
Year in Review: Activities 2024
Quo vadis, Network?
1. How open or closed do we want the network to be?
2. Frequency of Meetings, Possibility of Meeting in Person
3. What Do We Want and/or Need from this Network?
Workshops, Events, Seminars
1. Planned and upcoming
2. Ideas for future events
Tasks and Responsibilities
Misc

Minutes

The minutes will be added after the meeting has concluded.

Graph Databases and Networks

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0200

TODO: Add description of the workshop.

Introduction to RDF

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0200

TODO: Add description of the workshop.

Annual Board Meeting 2023

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 11:15:00 +0100

Date and Time

The Board Meeting will be held on Zoom on December 15 at 10 am CET (9 am GMT). The Zoomlink will be sent out beforehand.

Agenda

Welcome
Deciding on a minute taker
Agenda and potential addenda
Year in Review: Activities 2023
Quo vadis, Network?
1. How open or closed do we want the network to be?
2. Frequency of Meetings, Possibility of Meeting in Person
3. What Do We Want and/or Need from this Network?
4. Ideas for Workshops, Events, Seminars
Tasks and Responsibilities
Misc

Minutes

Attendants: Madita Knöpfle, Eline Elmiger, Sven Kraus, Tarrin Wills, Balduin Landolt, Juliane Tiemann, Beeke Stegmann, Nora Kauffeldt, Guðrún Laufey Guðmundsdóttir, Svenja Walkenhorst, William Duba

Workshop Report Published

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 14:05:00 +0100

The report about the workshop “Digital Research in Old Norse Studies: Data Management and Infrastructure Needs”, which was held in Basel in Octobre 2022, has now been published in NordeuropaFORUM. We are very happy about the results and very grateful to everyone who contributed to both the workshop and the publication of the report.

You can read the report here

Next meetings in 2023

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 14:00:00 +0100

We will reconvene for two more network meetings in 2023.

The first will be held on November 24 2023 and is meant to be an open meeting for everyone to catch up on current projects and talk about what everyone is currently working on.

On December 15 we will hold our annual board meeting to discuss where we currently are at as a network, what plans we have for 2024, and where we see opportunities for collaboration.

Github Workshop

Fri, 05 May 2023 14:00:00 +0200

In this internal training session / workshop, Balduin gave us an introduction to the main features of Git and Github. We covered :

How to use GitHub Desktop along with an editor, here VSCode.
How to make, clone, and fork repositories.
How to commit to a repository and how to make useful commit descriptions.
How to fetch the latest commits and make branches.
How to make, comment, approve and merge a pull request.
What are conflicts and how to resolve them.
When and how to fork a repository.
Issues and what they’re used for.

Transkribus Workshop

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 13:22:22 +0200

Our first workshop with an invited guest instructor was held online.

Tobias Hodel, professor for Digital Humanities at the University of Bern, gave an introduction to Transkribus and the possibilities of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Old Norse manuscripts. The group invited Tobias because of a general interest in both using HTR systems and to gain a better understanding of how they work.

We started off with the use of the Transkribus software: Document management, layout recognition, text recognition and data export. Then we discussed how to fine-tune layout recognition to cope specifically with Icelandic manuscripts, and how we could train our own text recognition models for Old Norse texts. We learned to interpret error rates and learning curves, and how to recognize good and overfitted models.

Handrit.is Powersearch - Searching the Written Past

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 14:00:00 +0100

Guðrún Laufey Guðmundsdóttir presented the searching possibilities on Handrit.is.

Handrit.is is a standardized database, all information are machine-readable and accessable through GitHub and openly acccessible with APIs and can therefore be reused in different ways and projects.
The database offers three searching fields: Browse, Power search and an open search string on the main page.

The main emphasis of the talk was the different functions of the various search options and the challenges that arise during the registration of the catalogue data of the manuscripts. It is difficult to find the right balance between too much and too little information in the database, especially when focusing on delivering good search results. The search results depend on the registration and how accurate it is and according to the TEI-P5 guidelines, as a standardized and precise registration is the key to a good search result, so the database can be used to its fullest by researchers.

SQL Introduction

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 10:00:00 +0100

Our first internal training session / workshop was held online.

Tarrin introduced the group to SQL with an overview of its uses and principles and he took the group through the basic query syntax using manuscript cataloguing data.

And we ended with an example of how to generate node and edge tables for network analysis.

Pages Launch

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 16:39:01 +0100

We just launched our web page. Check it out!

The website is hosted through GitHub Pages, and was created with Hugo. Isn’t it amazing how easy it is to create decent-looking websites and get them online… for free!

A detailed description on how to contribute to these pages can be found here.

Network Foundation

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 17:04:55 +0100

During the workshop “Digital Research in Old Norse Studies: Data Management and Infrastructure Needs” in Basel, October 5-8 2022, organized by the working group Digitale Forschung in der Altnordistik, the workshop participants unanimously agreed that this exchange and collaboration should continue and be formalized.

We therefore founded an international research network “Digital Old Norse Studies”.

The aim of the network is continue the fruitful discussions we had at the workshop, to share ideas and data, to collaborate on projects, to organize more events, and to apply for shared projects and funding.