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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 19/05/2026

For sea-router calibration: 513 dated voyages from the Datini/Melis corpus (1379–1492) across galleys, carracks, brigantines and more. e.g. Venice → Mallorca, departing in a cog 19 Jun 1396: the router predicts 29 days, the source records 37. bsky.app/profile/did:...

Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 19/05/2026

Companion to the Datini Letters map: a new Voyages explorer for the Melis archive. 3,393 Mediterranean ship records (1379–1492). Arcs coloured by predominant vessel type per route. Ports geocoded via @whgazetteer.org. docuracy.github.io/datini/viagg... #DigitalHumanities #DH #MedievalMed

Map of the Mediterranean and adjacent waters on a dark basemap, showing 3,393 ship voyages from the Melis archive (1379–1492) as curved arcs between origin and destination ports. Arc colour encodes the predominant vessel type on each route: red for galleys (galea, galeotta, fusta, saettia), purple for cogs and carracks, gold for general sailing ships (nave, navetta, panfilo), teal for Mediterranean coastal traders (liuto, rampino, vacchetta), magenta for brigantines and pinnaces, sky-blue for boats and small craft, muted purple for unspecified types. Arc width scales to voyage count per route. The densest threads cluster across the western Mediterranean between Italy, Catalonia and the Balearics, with prominent reaches out to North Africa, the Aegean, the English Channel and the Atlantic. A left-hand sidebar lists filters — dated-only toggle, year range, vessel-type chips colour-matched to the map — and a legend giving each category's example types.

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 18/05/2026

Try a "Starts with" search for "smuggler" here: 36 results in GB c.1900 (excludes N.I.). You can download results as CSV or GeoJSON and use GIS tools to find those >3 mile inland. maps.nls.uk/projects/os1...

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 13/05/2026

Calculations of coastal visibility and meteorological attenuation are used together with hull and sail profiles, and seasonal wind, wave, and current data in this online tool for computing plausible ancient sea routes: github.com/docuracy/His...

This analysis would be impossible without the extraordinary work of the volunteers behind Dove's Guide for Church Bell Ringers, who have recorded bells across England and Wales and made their data freely available. A remarkable community resource 👏 5/5 dove.cccbr.org.uk #Bellringing #ChurchBells

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In upland regions where pack-horses were the normal mode, heavy bells could not have travelled by that mode at all, which makes their presence there a stronger signal, not a weaker one. A bell in the Pennines is more interesting than a bell in the Home Counties. 4/5

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Second, absence of bells tells us nothing: ways existed wherever people travelled, regardless of whether anyone at the destination wanted a five-hundredweight lump of bronze. The map shows where ways were used for this purpose, which is not quite the same thing. 3/5

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Two obvious objections. First, a parish desperate enough for a bell might have made a one-off effort (repairing a way, bridging a ditch) that left no permanent improvement. Presence of a bell is evidence of a journey, not necessarily of a usable way. 2/5 Waterways: doi.org/10.5284/1057...

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Cambridge University History Faculty @camhistory.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

🔔 A heavy church bell meant a heavy cart and a way capable of bearing it. Can the spread of bells >5cwt from their foundries serve as a proxy for pre-modern wheeled-transport networks, at least where navigable waterways can be ruled out? 1/5 #HistoricalGIS #EconomicHistory #TransportHistory

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Reposted by Stephen Gadd

How @camunicampop.bsky.social researchers are turning static snapshots of Victorian Britain into dynamic life histories. The team are linking over 200 million census records, revealing how people moved, worked and lived in ways never before possible. 🔎 Read on 👉 www.hist.cam.ac.uk/news/tracing...

How researchers are linking over 200 million census records to transform historical research

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 04/05/2026

Thanks! Experience and ingenuity 😉. Also MapLibre GL JS for the map, D3 for the ego-network graphs, and a Python script to crunch Franklin-Lyons & Oleinikov's OSF dataset into static GeoJSON, aided by Claude. No framework, no build step, just one HTML file on GitHub Pages. github.com/docuracy/datini

Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 04/05/2026

Update for anyone returning to this thread: I've added click-to-focus city filtering and full-state shareable links to the explorer. bsky.app/profile/docu...

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 04/05/2026

New in the Datini Letters explorer: click any city to focus on its correspondence routes. Shareable links capture the full state of the view. docuracy.github.io/datini/#mode... #MedievalSky #DigitalHumanities

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 03/05/2026

Unfortunately not, as far as I am aware.

Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 02/05/2026

Coincidentally, bsky.app/profile/hous.... Nothing like "nuanced searching" though. 🫤

Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 01/05/2026

✉️ Explore 145,000 medieval merchant letters as a live map: the correspondence network of Francesco di Marco Datini (c.1363–1412), spanning Florence to Barcelona to North Africa. Visualise routes, travel times & seasonality. docuracy.github.io/datini/ #DigitalHumanities #MedievalHistory

A dark-themed interactive map of the medieval western Mediterranean showing 14th-century merchant letter routes as curved arcs coloured from cyan (fast, 0–5 days) through yellow to red (30+ days). Short land routes between Tuscan cities glow cyan; longer sea routes to Barcelona and Majorca burn orange and red, revealing the unpredictability of medieval maritime travel.
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Long (accessible description for screen readers / figure caption):
Screenshot of the Datini Letters Geospatial Explorer in Travel Time mode. A dark basemap of the western Mediterranean is overlaid with curved arc lines connecting pairs of cities in the Datini merchant network. Arc colour encodes average letter delivery time on a gradient from cyan (near-instant, 0–5 days) through green and yellow (one to two weeks) to orange and deep red-magenta (more than 30 days). Dense clusters of fast cyan arcs radiate from Florence and Pisa across Tuscany, reflecting the reliable day-or-two land post. Arcs reaching westward to Barcelona, Valencia, and Palma de Majorca shift to orange and red, capturing the slower and far more variable sea routes that could take anywhere from a week to several months. City nodes are shown as circles: pink for the main Datini fondacos (Pisa, Florence, Barcelona, Genoa, Valencia, Majorca) and blue for correspondent cities. A sidebar on the left shows the Travel Time mode is selected, with a cyan-to-red colour legend and a filter slider for minimum letters per route.

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 12/03/2026

... I'm struggling to find TNA catalogue references to Inquisitions Ad Quod Damnum for markets or fairs for the period 1507-1598. C 142 lists only one prior to 1599; C 143 predates 1507. Maybe calendared? @nejohnst.bsky.social | @thegozfather.bsky.social | @seanc1509.bsky.social | anyone, please?

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 11/03/2026

I have a big bag of later attestations which will appear in the extension in due course - including those from Owen's 1601 gazetteer of Welsh Markets and Fairs (aka "The Taylors Cussion").

Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 11/03/2026

Medieval Markets & Fairs in England & Wales: remember the excellent dataset published back in 2003? I've given it a snazzy new interface, incorporating various updates which were made following publication. Separately, I'm working on extending it to 1846... ihr-digital.github.io/markets-and-...

Image showing the new interface for the 2003 Medieval Markets & Fairs dataset.

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 21/01/2026

Or indeed their root vegetables.

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 21/01/2026

Talking of books, you might like the section on Agriculture in the Shropshire @vch-home.bsky.social, which discusses the turnip prizes awarded to Lord Clive's tenants. www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/salop/vo....

british-history.ac.uk

Domesday Book: 1750-1875 | British History Online

A History of the County of Shropshire: Volume 4, Agriculture. Originally published by Victoria County History, London, 1989.

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 12/12/2025

Interesting, thanks for posting. But a quick check of buildings in my neighbourhood indicates massive underestimation of their heights, so I hope that the broad analysis of economic development that it purports to offer is not relied upon in any policy-making circles. Classic AI trap.

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Reposted by Stephen Gadd

Gabriel Bodard @palaeofuturist.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

(4) Linking Knowledge Through Place: ISHI, WHG, and the Future of Gazetteer Collaboration, with @rmostern.bsky.social @docuracy.co.uk, Alexandra Loranna, Palak Vashist. Look at Institute for Spatial History Innovation & World Historical Gazetteer. Register to participate at forms.gle/dzSq2GibT17n...

forms.gle

Linking Knowledge Through Place: ISHI, WHG, and the Future of Gazetteer Collaboration

Description: This activity focuses on advancing collaborative methods for historical place alignment across gazetteers and related datasets within the Pelagios community. It brings together members of...

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Reposted by Stephen Gadd

Gabriel Bodard @palaeofuturist.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

Linked Pasts 11 programme (December 1–5 and some 8–12) linkedpasts.hcommons.org/2025/11/09/l...

linkedpasts.hcommons.org

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 12/10/2025

The website hasn't quite caught up yet: just awaiting approvals before we jump straight to publishing a 3.2 release, complete with a Reconciliation API, hopefully in the coming week. Thank _you_ for entrusting this exceptionally challenging and rewarding project to me, @kgeographer.bsky.social !

Dr Trixie Gadd @trixiegadd.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

Reposted by Stephen Gadd

This week's fungi for #FungiFriday.

Death cap and false death cap, red and orange fly agaric, lawyer's wig, penny bun and blusher.

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Reposted by Stephen Gadd

Dr Rebecca Tyson @tyguson.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

Today I start my research trip sailing down the River Seine from Paris to Honfleur (via a few stops) in a reconstruction of the Klåstad cargo ship built in 998. It’s the penultimate stage in the ship’s journey from Rome to London throughout the summer. I’ll post updates as we go #Saga25 #MedievalSky

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 02/08/2025

Sounds amazing! I'm curious to see how closely the cross-Channel route and timing match this 4-or-5-day wind-and-current-based prediction from docuracy.github.io/Historical_S...

Predicted optimum route from Honfleur to London for a knarr sailing in August.

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 19/07/2025

Hours of fun spent realigning my foolishly London-centric assumptions about medieval European trading networks. Shetland, for example, was far from peripheral: a non-Mercator map-projection helps. I've rebuilt the journey-timed, square-rigged sailing algorithm for docuracy.github.io/Historical_S...

Map of northern and western Europe showing computed square-rigged sailing routes between the Baltic Sea and Spain. Outward journeys curve northwest via Shetland and the North Atlantic, while return journeys favour the English Channel. This asymmetry arises from prevailing winds, currents, and the hydrodynamic limits of medieval sailing vessels. A spherical (non-Mercator) projection is used, better reflecting great-circle geometry and the true spatial relationship of regions such as Scandinavia, Shetland, and Iberia.

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 18/07/2025

That's not what I see. Apply those unemployment rates to mid-career wages and it's evident that humanities are not a "safe financial bet". The situation is even worse when you factor in underemployment and investment in graduate degrees.

Data table showing labor market outcomes for select college majors including Computer Science, Engineering, Graphic Design, English, History, and Philosophy, detailing their unemployment and underemployment rates, early and mid-career median wages, and the financial impact of unemployment and underemployment on mid-career earnings.

Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 05/07/2025

Thanks, @drpda.bsky.social, this looks like a really useful source, as it includes dates and waypoints for a number of long-distance voyages. 👏 I'd love to get hold of Paula Martin's transcript, though: any suggestions of how I might do that?

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 05/07/2025

🌍 Ports are now (optionally) shown on the eRutter to help with route picking. 🤔 They're currently fetched from @wikidatacommunity.bsky.social, but this would be a great use case for a @whgazetteer.org temporal API to filter out modern ports and highlight ancient ones.

At low zoom levels, cluster markers indicate the locations of ports.

At higher zoom levels, each port gets its own marker, coloured by category.

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 04/07/2025

... 📖 All of the code for extending coverage can be found together with an outline of the methodology at github.com/docuracy/His.... [3/3]

The grid of H3 cells at blended resolutions strikes a balance between detail and responsiveness.

A grid of H3 cells over land facilitates computation of the visibility of features out at sea.

Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 04/07/2025

... 📱It works better on mobile devices now too, using Mercator projection instead of globe, and with an initially-minimised Options panel. The routes and all parameters used can be exported for use in other GIS applications. [2/3]

Screenshot showing mobile optimisations: Mercator map projection, and initially-closed Options panel.