Hello everyone 

welcome to the second session of this 

webinar entitle digital humanities 

new approach to research 

and teaching of the medieval 

Mediterranean I would like to 

to say thanks again to the society of 

the medieval Mediterranean 

for sponsoring this webinar. in this 

session 

focus on digital teaching we have the 

privilege to count with the presence 

of panelists who are expert, who are 

specialized in this file 

okay just like previous session I will 

introduce them in order of 

appearance so and then we have 

then we will speak and then we have time 

for enough time for question okay For 

attendees to make questions to the 

speakers so 

our first panelist is Jamie Wood 

okay okay 

Jamie that we have now in a video okay  is associate professor of history at 

the university of Lincoln 

he's especially interested in digital 

pedagogies 

and to create and share the results of 

the independent work 

with others both within and beyond 

the academy okay so thank you for stay 



here Jamie and 

the next speaker will be Charles west 

I tried to put down yep just hi 

Charles. Charles is  

reader in medieval history at the 

university of Sheffield 

his focus on the advantages of Wikipedia 

for teaching at the higher education 

specifically, in medieval history so 

thank you for staying here Charles. 

Our next speaker  is 

okay 

okay try to okay 

Lynn Ramey is professor of 

French 

at Vanderbilt university and faculty 

director 

of the digital humanities centre she's 

working to create a video game 

engine that will allow a video game 

engine sorry that will allow users to 

play as medieval travellers so quite 

interesting 

Our next finalist thank you Lynn for for 

staying here as well 

our next panellist is Dr Robert Houghton 

I will try to put them into the screen 

you are not we don't have you in this 

okay Robert I don't know because Jamie is fixed in 

the screen i think 

i tried to fix it 



now I don't know if you could see Jamie, i 

don't know if you see Robert in the 

screen 

would you say me . Yeah I can see Robert 

yeah 

okay okay  

as i say Robert Houghton is interested in 

video games too 

he's a new lecturer in early medieval 

history at the university of Winchester 

his work considers the representation of 

of the middle ages 

in modern games and the ways in which 

these games can be used for teaching and 

research 

okay and finally  

we have 

here Ainoa 

his lecturer in manuscript studies and 

history of the church 

at the university of Salamanca in Spain 

see are in charge of the website 

literavisigotica.com 

about Iberian peninsula manuscript 

studies focus focuses 

sorry on Visigothic script so thank you 

all of you for 

staying here today and 

now we will start 

I am going to make sorry i'm 

going to make a quick introduction uh 



to how this webinar works i remind you 

that each 

speaker will take about 15 minutes and 

then we will we'll go 

on to the q and a questions okay for 

about 10 

15 minutes so i would like to encourage 

attendees all of you attendees that you 

are 

here we know to write their comments or 

questions in the q a portal that you 

have at the bottom of the screen okay 

so are you ready let's start okay 

so we will begin with 

our first first panelist that is Jamie i 

am going to try to 

okay thank you for disconnect the video 

okay thank you Lynn okay so 

Jamie will give leave a paper about 

making digital history 

so i hand over to you Jamie thank you. 

okay thank you um hopefully everyone can 

see me 

and yep I’m going to try and 

share my screen in right now 

you see my screen yeah yeah 

excellent I will start the slideshow 

um 

okay um as Nerea  said I’m um 

associate professor in history at the 

university of Lincoln in a medieval 



historian and I work particularly on the 

late antiquing early medieval period in 

the Iberian peninsula 

but for the past few years I’ve been 

involved in various 

digital history digital history teaching 

projects at the university of Lincoln 

and collaborating with people 

elsewhere so I’m going to sort of 

talk to you a little bit about some of 

those and then 

the main part of the talk will be about 

one of one particular project I’ve been 

doing over the last 

couple of years um there's no 

pretence here to being systematic this 

doesn't this diagram doesn't represent 

any kind of theory of teaching and 

learning it simply represents 

my um what I’ve worked on 

really um and I was trying to for an 

introduction I wanted to kind of try and 

summarize some of the 

kind of try and tie that together and 

really what what 

my approach to digital history teaching 

particularly in teaching medieval things 

um because that's my specialism has been 

to focus on 

active engagement active student 

engagement 



not passive engagement um so there are a 

number of different ways in which I 

I’ve tried to work with this over the 

years um 

to encourage students to learn about 

navigating the internet 

for themselves rather than telling them 

not to do it which was the approach when 

I first started teaching 

warning people off Wikipedia hasn't 

worked 

engaging students actively and 

creatively with Wikipedia like Charles 

is going to talk about has 

I think has a lot more benefits to it 

and 

I am particularly interested in 

approaches that encourage students right 

from the start of their degrees 

and this extends beyond digital 

approaches 

getting students to ask their own 

questions rather than focusing on 

answering the questions that we want to 

ask them um 

I’ve also been interested in the 

different ways in which students learn 

through play and that's whether they 

learn through play within the classroom 

through possibly creating kind of games 

within the classroom 



or what they learn through um playing 

computer games 

so I’m particularly interested to hear 

Robert’s talk as well 

um and really through all this what 

I’m very interested in 

and unpicking and what i think is 

particularly powerful for students is 

this idea of making that they 

by making things objects digitally 

or making meaning for themselves by 

doing things 

actively this is one of the this is a 

really powerful way of activating 

student learning and engagement and 

interest in our subject 

um the the project I’m going to talk 

about now is one that's about reading 

and really thinking about how we 

one of the how we kind of teach students 

to read really and 

thinking about how we can encourage them 

to be more active in their approach to 

reading 

online in particular uh through actively 

commenting and through asking again 

asking questions of their own based on 

their reading rather than answering 

my questions about the reading I already 

know what answers I’ve got to my 

questions I don't really need the 



students to tell me them 

it's if I’m being perfectly frank um 

so the the project that I’ve been doing 

for the last couple of years um 

is called act is kind of decided to call 

its active online reading 

and it really stemmed from a problem 

that i've faced 

ever since i began teaching at 

university over 15 years ago now 

is how to get students to 

engage actively with their reading 

I used to be perplexed that students 

would come to class and seem not to have 

done the reading or not really to have 

processed it at all or to have like a 

minimal grasp of what they'd read 

and I used it when I first started I 

used to think it was because they 

weren't doing the reading 

what i over time have come to understand 

is that most 

many students not all students but most 

students do do the reading or try to do 

it 

the issue is that there isn't an 

that reading isn't activated they're not 

encouraged to process that reading or at 

least in the way that I was doing it 

they weren't encouraged 

to process it so over the last couple of 



years what 

over several years but particularly of 

the last couple of years i've been 

working on a project that's about 

encouraging students to engage actively 

with their reading 

and to think critically and ask 

questions about reading as they're doing 

it 

and the way I’ve done this is by using 

an online tool called Talis elevate 

which is which i'll show you on the next 

screen which is a tool that enables 

students to 

collectively individually and 

collectively to annotate 

the readings and to share them with one 

another to share them with me 

but the approach I’m going to talk about 

does not rely on using talis elevate it 

simply relies on having a shared online 

space 

in which students can comment collect 

can comment on reading and share their 

thoughts with one another 

um what it's enabled me to do is to gain 

an insight into how 

students interact with readings and for 

the students it enables them to create 

generate a shared bank of knowledge that 

they can work on together and 



come back to when they're doing 

assignments 

so overall what I’ve been trying to do 

over the last few years is promote more 

active 

engagement in reading by the students 

and that just simply means getting the 

students to think 

it's not about doing anything fancy 

creating online objects or anything like 

that it's simply getting them to do 

some very basic level processing while 

they're 

engaging um the context in which I’ve 

done this although we've been 

experimenting with it across 

um my department at Lincoln is in a 

third year module that's my own 

research-based module um and I’ve been 

doing it for the last two years so the 

first year we've seen we had one group 

of students about 20 and last year we 

had 

we doubled the numbers so there were 

about 40 students 

what I require the students to do every 

week is relatively simple 

a key point about it though is that it 

is assessed so it carries a grade so 

that really motivates the students to 

engage 



they're required to post two or three 

online comments on the weekly readings 

that they're doing that's all they have 

to do and what you have here is a 

a screenshot of talis elevate that shows 

you what it looks like when the students 

are doing their annotations 

they highlight text they add an 

annotation they can respond to each 

other's comments 

but it simply looks like a kind of pdf a 

pdf viewer 

in a way and as I said it doesn't 

require the use of this specific tool 

talis elevate it could be any kind of 

forum for sharing 

readings online students can can 

complete this activity 

I ask them to do things like point out 

points of interest 

ask questions that this raises for them 

and think about things like how the 

materials relate to one another how the 

different weeks relate to one another 

how it relates to other modules they've 

done so 

it's just getting them to think about 

the reading not asking them specific 

questions 

I use this then to structure the 

seminars and as I said it creates a 



shared bank of knowledge for the 

students which they can come back to 

later and 

they seem to really appreciate this 

we've seen quite high levels of 

engagement with this activity 

and so in the first year over the course 

of the semester we had over 500 comments 

in the second year we doubled that they 

were double the number of students 

and you can see from the two graphs that 

the class was on a thursday because 

that's when most of the comments 

happened 

the middle graph and the one on the 

right what you can see is that 

attainment sort of engagement peaked 

around about around assessment time 

but that it was fairly high throughout 

except right 

at the very end and I found that most 

students engaged with this activity 

some students didn't but many students 

don't engage with 

whatever activity you asked them to do 

some of them really got 

deeply engaged with it and found it very 

useful they took a lot of private notes 

as well so they were using it as a kind 

of way of taking notes to support their 

own individual learning 



as well as collectively um 

how do I encourage this engagement 

basically, I frame the whole activity as 

being relatively low 

engagement they need to do a little bit 

and often they don't have to do a great 

deal 

but there is a benefit from this 

engagement so I kind of 

make her um make a make a positive out 

of an instrument a potentially 

instrumental approach to 

to their learning a question I’ve got 

asked several times when I’ve given 

versions of this talk before is 

does this activity or activities like it 

engage different kinds of students 

and I think that what I found is that to 

some extent 

certain students who don't say anything 

in class really prefer this 

this approach and the feedback that I’ve 

got from students reflects that 

so it's quite good for engaging certain 

certain groups of students that don't 

normally engage but what I’ve also found 

is it continues to engage those students 

who are quite vocal 

usually students who are vocal in class 

will be vocal 

in an online space too so they're 



willing to still to share their thoughts 

so it doesn't 

alienate strong students what we would 

traditionally consider to be strong 

students who contribute a lot in class 

but it brings along 

other groups of students the final thing 

that 

i want to emphasize uh is that i could 

treat this as entirely as a student 

space 

I don't intervene when they're 

commenting at all 

obviously if they posted something 

inappropriate I would say something but 

they don't 

they haven't done that so far and so 

it's not about me 

going in there and interacting with them 

it's not about me going in there and 

asking questions it's about the students 

engaging with the material themselves 

then I can see that and I use that to 

structure what we do in class 

that's where my intervention comes when 

I’m thinking about what we're doing 

in class um 

here are a few just a couple of comments 

from students um 

one of the benefits that they pick out 

is that it gives requiring this low 



level of active engagement means that 

every student has 

who's engaged can kind of develop a 

baseline of knowledge for when they come 

to class 

it enables them to learn from each other 

and kind of clarify understanding if 

they 

if they need to if they've not quite 

understood something 

and the second quotation at least the 

first part of the second quotation 

really gets to this idea of a sort of 

safe space for some students who feel 

perhaps feel a little bit more um 

reticent about 

speaking out in class um 

and then the second point is really what 

one of the key things I want them to 

learn which is engaging directly with a 

specific piece of text 

which is I’ve often found quite 

difficult to get students to understand 

that's the craft of that's one of the 

key points of the craft of doing 

the topic is picking out specific pieces 

of evidence 

and and using that to back up your 

argument this is quite a good way of 

doing that because 

highlighting the text and adding a 



comment requires the students to do that 

um I think yeah I’m at about 11 minutes 

so I’m gonna I’ve got two slides left 

um i i think right okay so the first one 

is 

what I did was I kind of did a did an 

overview of the 

um types of comments that I saw 

students making on the readings and as 

you saw I had a very large number of 

comments to kind of look at so this is 

kind of impressionistic I haven't 

done the stats and I think it reflects 

some of the ways in which students 

engage with 

texts um if they're not 

given direction so this is what happened 

when I didn't tell the students what to 

do 

what was that what I started to see was 

quite quite a lot of students would make 

comments that were of a sort of 

commentary nature they would they kind 

of 

um say what this paraphrase what the 

text said 

um then some students would take that to 

the next level and do some kind of 

analysis they try and say well what does 

this mean how does this relate to other 

things we've looked at they try to kind 



of take it to a next level 

as I said I was asking I was 

specifically asking the students to pose 

their own questions 

so quite a lot of students posed 

questions broadening out from the text 

um one of the things that I did notice 

was 

there wasn't a great deal of discussion 

there hasn't been a great deal of 

discussion between the students what you 

tend to 

happen is that students will cluster 

their comments around 

um a particular area that they seem to 

be finding of interest 

rather than um actually discussing it 

and I think that's quite interesting 

again I wasn't directing them to do that 

but but 

this was quite i think it it speaks to a 

certain reticence to engage directly 

with one another 

and then there's a certain level at 

which students cry to try to create 

connections between the module 

between the different sessions on the 

module 

less common are are those sorts of what 

I think are more interactive 

uh discursive connections between 



students I think 

directly discussing things answering one 

another's questions 

question questioning one another's 

questions and i haven't seen as much of 

that 

and I think that's probably because of 

the way I framed the activity 

but I think by looking at these these 

comments what I start to see is the 

different ways in which students 

actually engage with the text and i 

think that's useful for thinking 

as I go forward about how I might start 

to direct them to develop different 

skills in the future 

okay just some reflections and 

conclusions 

um the first block of is really about 

what I think the benefits are of this 

active approach to reading 

I think um by asking students to do a 

frequent micro level engagement with the 

text just little things and often 

it requires them to pro to learn how to 

process the reading 

rather than expecting them to do it just 

because I’ve said it 

um so I think that's that's vital that's 

the active part of this I think 

in terms of sort of 



selling it to the students the key thing 

is really this framing that I I frame 

this as 

it's low input it's low risk 

you're sharing small pieces you you're 

sharing with the others but it's not 

sharing everything 

it's not the same as being in a seminar 

but that there's reward attached to it 

so the framing is quite important 

um and I think that that process 

of kind of actively querying the text 

is really important for getting the 

students to understand what it is 

we do when we're being historians or 

being medieval historians 

and i don't think often a lot of 

attention is paid to that we assume that 

the students can read 

actively um and and this is one approach 

that I found works quite well for it for 

for doing that in terms of making 

digital history what 

my overall sort of final points are 

I think this approach complements it 

doesn't replace traditional methods I 

think 

in fact, one of the strengths of it is 

that it's developing disciplinary skills 

at the same time showing students how to 

use different types of tools 



and so it complements it it complements 

what we do already 

but it develops different skills and 

capabilities for the students 

and it encourages them to be active it 

encourages them to be purposive it 

encourages them to take 

to decide what they're going to do and 

actually actually do it rather than 

being told what to do 

and i think there's a great benefit from 

the kind of collective aspect here too 

and 

by getting the students to work together 

they're able to achieve a lot more than 

if they work independently and that's 

one again one of the ways in which I try 

and sell 

the idea of sharing your thoughts to the 

students 

so they're just a few insights from my 

experience um 

and the the final thing is that I have 

to get leave 

and soon to go and put my daughter to 

bed um 

my little daughter and so I’m not going 

to be able to around for questions but 

if anyone does have any questions I’m 

more than happy to answer 

them via email or for you to pass them 



to Nerea and I will answer them 

um afterwards if there are any in the 

chat now I’ll have a very a quick look 

and try and answer them too 

okay so thank you um very much 

i'll stop sharing yes 

Jamie, indeed, there are one question for 

you so if you want to ask now and then 

we will pass to another speaker okay 

yeah that's fine. 

It is a question from David Natal 

who are wondering how did you mark the 

talis elevate activity 

how did you differentiate between two to 

one and two to two for instance 

also 15 percent good video world market 

as hul i assume that is not the case at 

Lincoln 

so what we we have a specific rubric 

for  students participation 

in class we've always had that and what 

i've used 

this as an opportunity to do what 

colleagues have used this an 

opportunity to do alongside me is to 

develop 

a rubric that allows us to assess the 

student's engagement and work outside of 

the class 

so this is this means we've got a model 

now for assessing 



what the work that students are doing 

online 

which is going to prove really useful 

over the next few months 

possibly years um so it 

for the kind of participation element 

some of it is simply for doing the task 

the students will receive a grade 

but there's also a kind of um 

element of the grade that is for the 

kind of level of intellectual engagement 

with the activity 

um and we've kind of tried to 

um 

like to think about whatwhat would 

be a 2-1 piece of work in the UK means 

something that's graded between 60 and 

70 percent 

at first-class grade is above 70 so 

we we've tried to kind of balance that 

by by using this participation rubric 

that now has an 

online element um 

if anyone would like to have access to 

that I’m more than happy to share that 

with them 

and does that answer the question i 

think 

i think that this okay because we have 

in the qa 

yeah okay the rest of question for jamie 



uh 

must be by email I send you later your 

email okay because if not we don't have 

enough time for continue with this 

webinar 

so Dominique I will give you the email of 

Jamie okay 

later okay thank you everyone okay thank 

you Jamie 

bye-bye bye okay 

Now we go with our second speaker 

Charles who will talk about wikipedia 

and the 21st century middle ages. Now 

Charles is your turn thank you for 

stay here so whenever you want . 

thank you 

very much everybody i hope you can all 

hear me all right 

um it's great to be joining you and I’m 

honoured to be in such illustrious 

company 

um I often start talks like this one 

with what sounds like a mini 

advertisement for Wikipedia 

um it gets billions of views um every 

month from across the world 

it's the most comprehensive in 

encyclopaedia ever  have existed 

even bigger than um Evina Steinova's 

Isidoro Seville's etymologies it's the 

world's main source of historical 



knowledge reaching people without access 

to libraries and making knowledge 

accessible to anybody without an 

internet connect 

with only an internet connection and 

this I think very appealing these days 

um in these days of paywalls and 

high subscriptions and things like that 

um worth pointing out by the way that 

Wikipedia’s traffic um 

went up very considerably during 

lockdown because everywhere else is 

closed so so where are you going to find 

things out from I’d also point out it's 

durable it's a digital humanities 

project which is now over 20 years old 

and still going strong 

it's open for everybody to edit and 

improve so it's democratic 

and it's transparent I’m sure you all 

know this already but every Wikipedia 

page has a history of its own which 

anyone can check so you can find out for 

yourself 

who added which bits to which page when 

um wikipedia these days is um slight 

exaggeration perhaps but it's as close 

to the truth as the internet gets 

right so I think that makes it pretty 

important 

I’m not actually as much of a techno 



optimist however as that spiel might 

make me sound 

um Wikipedia does have problems too in 

its demographics most of its editors are 

white middle-aged men 

um and with its growing internal 

complexity um you know you can 

practically watch as it becomes 

increasingly complicated for novices to 

navigate when they when they make their 

edits 

and that's got big implications for 

what's featured and though Wikipedia 

itself is a not-for-profit company 

it nevertheless underpins in important 

ways the very much-for-profit strategies 

of 

huge companies like amazon and google 

both of whom regularly make substantial 

donations to Wikipedia 

and use its data in their algorithms 

precisely because it's neutral and 

trustworthy so when you edit wikipedia 

you're adding value to google 

uh you're making jeff that's also a 

little bit richer um you are feeding 

the Silicon Valley leviathan. However 

we have to deal with the world as it is 

not as we would like it to be 

and the point remains that Wikipedia is 

now the main way in which the world 



finds out about the past 

and the main way in which um the ideas 

and and statements about history get 

fact checked and that seems unlikely to 

change 

any time soon so getting your students 

to contribute to wikipedia is a way of 

teaching them about about public history 

it's way of giving them some practical 

digital humanities experience 

and its way of improving the world's 

access to history in general 

and medieval history in particular so 

making sure that the middle ages has the 

profile on the internet that we all know 

it deserves 

okay this might sound like it sounds all 

very well in principle 

how does it sound in how does it work in 

practice 

so I’ve been getting students here in 

Sheffield to edit Wikipedia for a few 

years now 

mostly at ma level though this year I’m 

planning to have a go with some final 

year undergraduates as well 

inspired by colleagues who've done this 

with great results 

I give the students a few pointers and 

then they take some free online training 

uh provided by the brilliant wiki wiki 



media 

um which is a charity which supports 

wikipedia 

and that just gives them the basics um 

you can find my old module guide online 

if you just search 

for teaching with wikipedia and my name 

is it's on google so you can have a look 

exactly how i do it 

now together my students and over the 

last few years have edited about 30 

Wikipedia pages 

that doesn't sound that many um and in 

ways not that many 

but together we have nevertheless 

improved the site's coverage of the 

middle ages and let me give you a couple 

of examples 

one student created a new page on um on 

the Carolingian pilgrim 

Bernard he's a monk who made a journey 

to Jerusalem in the 860s 

Bernie is an interesting figure um he is 

not hugely famous 

and his Wikipedia page now gets about 

one or two views a day 

um in Wikipedia terms that's peanuts 

right I mean it's 

that's super niche um but it adds up so 

over the past few years this student's 

work has now been viewed and 



read more than a thousand times you know 

that's 

rather more than can be said for most 

assignments and essays and as an added 

benefit it's also created a useful 

resource for students on 

other modules which I teach and 

interesting actually since it was 

created 

the page has been further edited by six 

other anonymous Wikipedia’s so it's 

really become a kind of collaborative 

project 

most students on this Wikipedia model 

I’ve been teaching actually though edit 

already existing pages rather than 

starting new ones and here 

the impact is a bit harder to kind of 

quantify or to measure 

but let me give you another example here 

of the anglo-saxon council of Hartford 

um which is fairly obscure well anyway 

now since 1963 it's been agreed by 

specialists that this council took place 

in the year 672 

but until 2018 Wikipedia relied on 

pre-1963 scholarship and put the date at 

673 

so the student added in the correct date 

to the page and has 

also a section on why the dating has 



been changed and actually interestingly 

in discussion with me 

the student pointed out that before her 

edits a surprising number of 

recently published books and articles 

had strangely used the antiquated six 

seventh through day for the council of 

hartford 

um who knows where those uh those 

scholars got their information from 

now again the council department isn't a 

particularly high-profile page 

um but it gets about four visits a day 

and you know 

that's a lot again relative to most 

assignments 

um no powerpoint for me it's just it's 

just me chatting 

um and those four visitors a day who are 

now 

looking at this page are now getting 

more accurate information 

than they would otherwise i don't want 

to make this 

um seem to um a rosy this experiment 

um um because there have been some some 

some bumps in the 

in in the road um how in a second 

so um 

one year a student had all her edits 

overturned okay by a zealous editor 



another year another student had a 

lengthy battle with an editor which 

resulted in an unsatisfactory compromise 

some changes have seemed to be 

potentially to make wikipedia pages 

more detailed but also more confusing I 

mean writing a clear encyclopaedia entry 

is 

hard and Wikipedia entry pages often 

become 

sprawling messes but because I assess 

the course 

through a reflexive essay and not on the 

edits themselves these problems just 

become more ingredients 

for students to reflect on okay 

with all this in mind I think there's 

lots for to encourage you to get your 

students editing Wikipedia 

um pedagogically it ticks all kinds of 

boxes some of which Jamie’s just been 

talking about 

it frames students as active producers 

not passive consumers 

it provides them with genuine experience 

of real-world collaboration 

it gives them practice in writing a 

non-academic register 

it enables them to put their expertise 

to practical use 

and it shows them the value of that 



expertise beyond the ivory tower 

and as students on the class tell me 

they love the way in which this 

course enables them to make some kind of 

tangible difference in the world which 

is not something you can 

usually say about medieval history 

options 

immensely valuable though we know they 

are 

and here's my tip if you can assess 

students on their reflections and not 

just on their edits 

well that provides a safety net in case 

things go wrong but also 

it develops student’s awareness of an 

important dimension of 21st century 

knowledge production and dissemination 

and how historical knowledge changes 

over time 

um I mean that's something all students 

know in history seems to know right in 

theory but it's different when they when 

they watch it happen and contribute 

to it happening seeing how Wikipedia 

pages 

morph from a base provided by the 1902 

encyclopaedia Britannica or the 1913 

catholic encyclopaedia 

which together provide the substrate for 

most articles on medieval European 



history 

it's really instructive by the way 

someone at some point should really do a 

study on how 

those two early 20th century 

encyclopedias have shaped 

the way medical history is presented 

so these are all really positive reasons 

i think to uh introduce wikipedia 

editing editing into your teaching 

as a way of equipping your students with 

valuable skills and of incrementally 

improving the encyclopedia 

but I want to end on a more sombre note 

as we've learned in recent years 

medieval history is often appropriated 

by 

malevolent political forces and let me 

give you a rather troubling example of 

that 

well academics were writing their 

articles in their books for a small and 

specialist audience 

a number of mostly anonymous Wikipedia 

editors slowly but surely slanted 

the Wikipedia page on the Frankish ruler 

Charles Martel 

to present his life as leading up to the 

battle of Poitiers or battle of tour 

as part of a wider framing of medieval 

history as a clash between Christianity 



and Islam 

and the Wikipedia page on Martel came 

gradually to reflect 

at least in part the ideology of the 

Christchurch murderer who wrote Martel's 

name on the barrel of a gun 

when he shot 51 innocent people in new 

Zealand 

over a weekend in march 2019 I borrowed 

Paul Fouracre’s book on 

merivingen frankie and I re-edited the 

Martel wikipedia page not to cut the 

battle of Poitiers outs altogether 

but to set the battle in a wider context 

as part of Martel's activities 

not their culmination. I’m not a Merovingian specialist 

but I was reasonably satisfied that the 

end result fairly represented up-to-date 

views on Martel 

But of course it wasn't the end result 

because since then since March 2019 what 

is 

basically alt-right ideology has been 

coming back to the Martel wikipedia page 

bit by drip bit 

drip by drip. I don't think these edits 

are part of an orchestrated campaign 

but then again they might be and I think 

this is quite a serious issue the page 

of Martel currently states and this is a 

quote most notably Martel decisively 



defeated a Muslim invasion of Aquitaine 

at the battle of tor 

this victory is seen as a crucial 

historic act of preservation of western 

culture. 

over a thousand people a day are now 

reading this wikipedia page on martel 

the battle of 

Poitiers which presents views that no 

serious 

specialist with countenance today now 

this isn't a criticism of Wikipedia 

it's not Wikipedia’s fault that this is 

a bad page um 

anyone can edit it but there are only so 

many hours in the day right and as 

individuals we can't spend all our time 

in Wikipedia 

edit walls when we have you know online 

teaching to prepare for 

so that's why i think ultimately the 

most important outcome of my 

uh M.A teaching on wikipedia isn't the 

30 or so pages that have been edited to 

date 

but the 30 also critically aware 

critically educated 

history students who've now been trained 

in how to edit Wikipedia pages 

and who might at some point down the 

line make more contributions themselves 



to the sisyphean task of 

keeping Wikipedia as the main source of 

global historical knowledge 

up to date on track and up to speed 

right or at least or at least they might 

at least understand from their own 

experience how 

claims to truth are stakes and 

negotiated on the platform 

and in some ways, this really isn't about 

making the world a better place it's 

just about stopping it from becoming a 

worse one 

and that like most things is best done 

collaboratively 

thank you very much. 

Oh, Charles fantastic thank you very much for this 

amazing 

paper .And now I encourage 

all the attendees to type your question 

in the q a portal 

and at the end of the webinar Charles 

could answer you to all of your question, I 

think that you have a lot of questions 

because it's 

a very interesting topic as well as 

Jaime´s topic okay. 

so now we have our third panellist 

yeah i have the microphone that is 

uh Lyn who talked about 

digital resources for teaching the 



medieval Mediterranean 

so Lynn when you want thank you okay 

thank you 

um yeah and and thank you Charles that 

was really interesting and it 

it uh actually comes in nicely with this 

uh discussion of various resources um 

one of my projects is to work on the 

global middle ages project which 

tries to bring in different views of the 

middle ages from around the world 

and the main goal for that is 

actually, to get a better understanding 

of what it was what the Middle 

Ages was and what it uh meant to the to 

the world and not just to the west and 

um 

so for this talk I’m really focusing on 

the Mediterranean but i want to get the 

point across 

that um through digital and online 

resources 

we can really teach a lot more um 

of the global middle ages in a variety 

of classroom settings and different 

disciplines than we 

than we ever could before so this is a 

pretty basic 

uh talk on where to find things 

so, for primary sources primary data and 

sources now 



it's really just a question of finding 

the 

the computing power and the time to 

process the information 

rather than waiting for interlibrary 

loans or acquiring funds to visit 

archives or doing any of those things 

it's really open to the public in ways 

that it never has been before 

so digital maps 3d models video, 

audio ,online archives ,and these are just 

some of the resources that we can give 

our students 

to give them this really i guess nuanced 

picture of 

the world from 500 to about 1500 

so i'm going to go through a series of 

those and 

and talk about just some examples of 

experiencing the past through these 

visualizations and immersive 

environments 

um which can be 3d it can be virtual it 

can be augmented reality 

um and to kind of how we can help our 

students how can we help ourselves 

really come closer to seeing 

and experiencing the past as it might 

have been 

experienced and seen by those who lived 

it. 



there are as always with all of these 

technologies and 

negatives and one of the things is 

accessing these resources, sometimes they 

are a little hard to find 

and there's not good ways to to locate 

the ones that you want for your class so 

i 

am going to talk a little bit about 

where to look because as we know 

you can look on google and google 

scholar and find a ton of print 

resources 

um it's harder to find platforms and 

it's harder to find articles that really 

talk about 

um aggregating digital medieval 

resources and 

uh let's let's try to look at those and 

see if we can find some that we can use 

in the classroom 

so um while you might encounter broken 

links or 

outdated materials these aggregation 

platforms and articles 

if you can go to those um let me 

actually 

show you it's this one 

um every time i touch sorry every time i 

touch my mouse it goes the next one 

uh yeah so you can find uh 



through these aggregated um resources 

you can find uh some of these 

scholars that are working on things so i 

would just suggest if you go to one of 

these sites and you find 

that um the links are broken or whatever 

just go ahead and contact the people who 

put it up and see what they've been 

working on lately 

because it is true that these digital 

projects go out of style 

um they no longer work on the platforms 

that they were developed for very 

quickly 

but that doesn't mean that the people 

who develop them aren't still 

working in that area um and in the 

archival 

resources that I that I’m talking about 

you can still access for the most part 

the data and that's 

that's pretty key for sustainability now 

if you're trying to find 

if you're teaching the medieval 

Mediterranean and you're trying to 

locate 

sources about non-western cultures um 

that that's a lot harder I would say 

uh we would like to at least at the 

global middle ages platform 

we really look for things authored by 



scholars from my diverse 

set of backgrounds so I can give an 

example and that's the 

the medieval academy of America’s 

curated medieval digital resources 

it gives it's a good resource and it 

provides short descriptions and links to 

these databases and digital projects but 

there aren't very many non-western 

resources at all 

um so that's what the global middle ages 

platform 

really focuses on so i would suggest 

that you you know 

maybe start at the global middle ages um 

platform so i put that at the bottom 

of the screen here um talking about 

these different portals 

I do think the medieval academy of 

America is a good one 

um but you know look for ones that may 

maybe bring in different 

points of view than what what your 

students may be used to getting 

okay so one of the resources that we 

like to 

to suggest are virtual and augmented 

reality just for the sense that students 

first of all enjoy it and they also get 

that sense of being there 

these have become really inexpensive to 



use in the classroom 

both in terms of technology and in terms 

of content 

so some of it at the very lowest entry 

point you can use on a smartphone 

and a cardboard app you know the little 

you can buy the little viewers a holder 

for your phone which only costs about 

eight dollars so 

even most classrooms can afford to 

get that and that's either at the you 

know with children 

so k-12 in the us or at the university 

level can can work with this 

and you can get much better viewers with 

access to more much more complex 

applications and they're still not that 

expensive so the the 

you know it's two hundred dollars for an 

oculus go you can spend on up to 

a thousand six hundred dollars for the 

htc vive or 

or others but you really don't need that 

in the classroom 

um then you just go through the online 

stores for these devices and buy these 

applications 

and use them uh with your students uh 

steem the gaming platform steam if 

you're familiar with that you can find 

um AR and VR content there as well 



um you just it's a little bit harder 

sometimes to find 

for instance the museum pieces and 

that's what i would suggest is that 

museum pieces are 

museum museums are a great source for 

this educational ar and vr content 

some now some museums however really 

want you to be on site to do this 

um but there are others like this one um 

on the screen now the live the past from 

the National Archaeological museum in 

Spain 

is I’ve played with it on the go and 

it's a lot of 

um fun and it's well done so if you can 

get your students I’ve put my students 

in that little environment 

and they kind of got the sense of of 

what it was like in medieval 

Muslim Spain um and it's available for 

oculus rift 

quest go or gear VR or you can 

and you can do it in Spanish or English 

a guide shows them kind of the village 

square back as it was the exterior of 

the mosque and then 

inside a home I just think it brings to 

life for the students what they can 

what was not really I guess 

it seems so far away to students 



sometimes that the doing this is a 

different 

a different thing for them um you can 

also freely explore the area 

and uh the same is true um for Hiverlab 

 churches of  Famaugusta 

and i think that's on my next one yeah 

this is um 

this is based on art and Michael Walsh's 

work it's 

really well documented so this is like a 

little 

um I guess a research piece in and of 

itself so 

you can have students um talk about 

these resources and photographs of these 

churches that 

you know he explains how they use 

texture maps to place over the digital 

frameworks for these buildings 

so you could either have the students 

talk about the process of creating these 

sorts of things 

or you could have them talk about the 

the objects themselves or the churches 

themselves and 

just whatever interests them I think you 

can you can go there 

with virtual Plasentia and I had that 

before I’m going to go back to that 

um I’m not sure why I had that out of 



order but 

uh that's on the bottom right there that 

uh virtual Plasentia you can find that 

at the globalmiddleages.org and it's 

uh Roger Martinez Davila's work 

on um on Plasencia 

and it's really interesting uh to play 

through this it's kind of gamified too 

which makes it fun 

but also he's got a crowd source site 

for working on manuscripts and all sorts 

of things that 

your students may find really 

interesting 

next I want to talk a little bit about 

3d maps 

let's see and online and interactive 

mapping 

um which is another thing that i think a 

resource that students enjoy and that 

you can get a lot out of too as a as a 

teacher 

um so what we try to do is is use these 

online maps to have students orient 

themselves spatially in the areas that 

they're being studied so 

this this uh helps them learn better but 

it also just gives them a sense of 

where are we talking about what are we 

talking about during what times 

so one site I like to use is the map 



hosted at the university of California 

Davis 

which allows students to explore the map 

based on topics 

like trade routes or religions or wind 

and ocean currents 

so it just depends on what their 

interests are it's very flexible for 

that 

um mapping mandible I think I’ve got um 

so that's the UC davis site sorry that i 

put the 

link for there but also here are a few 

more sites 

uh mapping mandible lets users see the 

world as viewed through the eyes of the 

14th century 

john of Mandeville who supposedly 

travels from 

from England to the east and it maps 

these onto a 

reproduction of the Hereford map 

students enjoy that they enjoy looking 

at the old maps and they also 

try to link it up with the modern-day um 

as a classroom project one thing I’ve 

had students do is to 

you know be inspired by these scholarly 

maps and then make their own maps of the 

works that they're studying just using 

google maps 



which is a very simple thing you go for 

instructions you can just look into 

my google maps so just google my google 

maps and you'll find out how to add your 

own maps and have students work in 

groups to add data 

you can add pictures you can add all 

sorts of resources to share 

okay databases 

and archives where can you find these 

things 

that they're harder to find than you 

might think but again look in the um 

aggregated resources portals 

if you can but i just wanted to talk 

about one syriaca.org which i find 

really um 

I guess a good example of all that it's 

a multinational 

uh group of people working on um 

resources that come from all over the 

world um and 

that's what i i find inspiring about 

this you could 

set the students to looking at um for 

instance the catalogs of saints 

the handbooks of the authors writing in 

Syriac the database of 

hagiographical literature and um 

they could do a project for instance you 

know locating translations of the 



stories of john the Baptist 

or comparing differences and and all the 

different tales of john the Baptist 

um and talking about time and place and 

composition you know what was going on 

at the time that these things were 

written 

um so this could really be something fun 

for younger 

students but it could go all the way up 

to the you know PhD level 

where people could use this as a 

resource for their work 

um otherwise I think you know cultural 

resources we like to 

kind of think about I think i'm gonna 

get 

uh that's actually my uh thing it's a 

soundscape of a medieval city 

in the Abbasid caliphate so I don't know 

if you can hear it but if you go to this 

it's it's oddly um I guess appealing to 

people 

to put together the soundscape and you 

can in the different channels that are 

there 

you can pick um what you want to have 

to have as the sound so 

um I like to use that a lot with my 

studentS um they really do enjoy 

uh kind of like what's what's the sound 



of animals the marketplace 

um being called to prayer uh what was it 

like 

to be there and it kind of peaks a 

different sense for students 

so these digital resources I think they 

just kind of bring the past and the 

present 

of these faraway lands to our doorsteps 

I like to think that they 

allow students to experience the past 

and other cultures in ways that are more 

diverse 

and bring them to a different 

understanding really of what's going on 

in in the history of other parts of the 

world 

so fortunately you don't have to create 

these you can have students create them 

but you can also simply guide students 

in the directions of these online 

resources 

and let them discover and bring to the 

classroom what they um 

find interesting um so that's it um 

thank you 

thank you very much  Lynn I can't wait to 

share all of these databases and 

and resources to my students 

because we began the course 

so thank you very much I have learned a lot 



and now I encourage everyone again 

to write all your questions that you 

have for Lynn or for Charles in the Q and A 

portal you could write it now 

and then at the end of the webinar  

both 

could ask your questions okay so now. 

yes i have yes okay so now 

we have our next panelist 

who is Robert Houghton who talked 

about 

the investiture contest a game for 

teaching and research 

so Robert okay you are in you have to 

okay okay thank you 

you are  

brilliant i'm not i think thank 

you very much 

thanks thanks very much for having me um 

and thanks to all of the speakers this 

has been 

fascinating um so much so well I should 

open by saying 

that my project is much more embryonic 

it's much less fully formed than the 

three that we've heard about 

to this point um let's see if I can get 

screen shared there 

is that working for everybody yeah 

brilliant marvelous so what I’m talking 

about today 



is a game that I’ve been producing a 

game that I’ve been using for teaching 

and for the last year or so now i've 

started life as a board game I’m 

moving it into a digital format 

currently 

but as I say very embryonic especially 

with the with the digital one 

from it I’ve included my details here if 

you want a copy of the 

the board game then please drop me an 

email but the rules are 

ridiculously simple but I’ll get on to 

explain that in a moment 

so what I’m going to do today then is 

talk about three things 

very briefly swiftly so first of all I 

want to talk a bit about 

how games can be used for teaching and 

indeed for historical research 

they want to go on and talk a bit about 

the board game I produced 

to look at the investiture contest and 

how I’ve used that for teaching in this 

past year 

and finally I’m going to go on and talk 

about how i'm 

planning to use this game um 

this academic year and how what are my 

plans for 

developing computer games for teaching 



in the future. So to start with 

there are plenty of examples of games 

being used 

for teaching um within the 

pre-university classroom 

especially but increasingly within the 

university classroom 

we're also starting to see a few 

examples of games being used 

for research purposes very importantly 

very broadly speaking and there are 

three primary ways in which 

we can use games to engage with history 

please you can use games through three 

ways in which games 

represent history so first of all games 

can represent 

history they can represent the past 

through their use of data for the use of 

landscapes as in on the top image here 

top left image here 

how they reconstruct built landscapes 

how they reconstruct 

material cultures and how they 

use historical figures so many of the 

things that Lynn was talking about in our 

paper 

this can be an incredibly useful way in 

which we can get students interested in 

a period of history it's where we can 

introduce them 



to some of the key themes of that period 

periods and the key ideas about 

the past and that's great 

but I think there's some more 

interesting ways in which 

games can be used to approach history 

and games can represent historical 

arguments and in fact I would make the 

case that any historical game 

make some kind of history of life and 

they do this primarily 

through their rules through the game 

mechanics 

so for example if you've got a game 

that's primarily about trade 

and the example I’ve got here is a 

patrician series 

where you travel around the Baltic sea 

selling, buying and selling goods and 

essentially becoming 

a more wealthy and powerful merchant 

so games which use economic structures 

like this they're representing 

a model of these structures and these 

structures are built on 

historical theory they're built on a 

particular argument about how these 

structures 

functioned how this limited 

aspect of the medieval world in this 

case um 



functioned how it worked 

and what I think is particularly 

interesting 

is that the players of these games are 

able to interrogate these arguments 

through play 

by engaging with the game, they engage 

they're required to engage with the 

game's mechanics and in turn 

they engage with the arguments which 

these mechanics represent 

and by playing the game perhaps both 

most obviously and they can interrogate 

these arguments by 

looking for deviations for historical 

norm 

so, the bottom left hand corner here we 

can see that or Charlemagne  

has conquered the entirety of Europe 

if this is something that happens 

routinely through game play 

this suggests that the argument that the 

game's mechanics 

do not perhaps fit the reality as well 

as they could 

it suggests that they need to become 

more nuanced to be a better fit 

for historical theory 

and ultimately it's possible to engage 

with history through games 

as a form of historical debate and this 



can be done by modifying games 

by changing the rules of the game, the 

players 

change the argument that it's making and 

by having a bit of back and forth here 

by providing mods encounter mods we can 

see 

more more developed arguments emerging 

through play 

so this is already interesting this is 

something that I’ve seen done a few 

times and in a few ways 

with computer games but there are 

there are several key issues when using 

computer games 

for these educational purposes and 

there are various issues but most most 

importantly for me 

um are the free issues of transparency 

cost and skill set so computer games 

first of all, they're 

woefully opaque they hide the vast 

majority of their mechanics from the 

players 

indeed they have to do this because 

otherwise the game can become impossible 

to play if you met with just a wall of 

data when you're trying to run your 

empire 

then things are much less interesting it 

can be completely impossible to play 



these games. Another issue 

is the sheer cost of computer games and 

especially 

more complex games and also the fact 

that the skill set required to produce 

computer 

games is very often very far removed 

from 

the skills the skills held by 

most historians 

and at the start of this project about a 

year ago 

I came up with a temporary solution I 

thought for all three of these issues 

and that's to move over to using 

physical 

gains for educational purposes this very 

neatly gets around the issue of 

transparency 

the players are the ones parsing rules 

they're the ones who have to understand 

how all the mechanics 

function you can't hide the rules from 

the player in the same way that you're 

obliged to 

when you're creating a computer game at 

the same time these games are cheaper to 

produce 

and easier to modify it's generally much 

easier to get your head around 

the rule set of a typical board game 



than it is for a computer game 

there's also severe limitations placed 

on how complex board games can be 

which in this case is an advantage 

i used all of this to produce a board 

game titled the investiture contest 

which 

surprisingly enough was about 

investigative contest 

so this is a conflict notionally between 

the pope and emperor 

in the second half of the 11th century 

going into the early 

12th century and the idea has 

traditionally been this is 

a conflict about investiture so who gets 

to select bishops 

and by extension who gets to control 

episcopal lands 

in reality the situation was much more 

complex but that tends to get skimmed 

over in most popular history so 

possibly something to have watch out for 

on on Wikipedia 

and in creating this game why sorry I 

created this game for use in a couple of 

modules so first of all 

an M.A course this is a postgraduate 

course on 

church society and conflict and a 

bachelor's undergraduate course 



on the middle ages in computer games and 

I used the game within 

both of these modules in the past year 

and with some 

somewhat different results because we've 

got students coming in with very 

different experiences 

of the material covered and 

of how games can address the past 

and the game itself the game itself is 

ridiculously simple 

um it's two pages of rules most of which 

are 

almost which concern the objectives held 

by each of the players 

so it's a game for up to six players 

each player represents 

one of six key figures within the 

investiture contest 

so the pope the pope and pope Gregory 

the seven 

antipope Clemente II, the emperor Henry IV the 

archbishops of Ravenna and  

Milan, Matilda of Tuscany and Rudolf of 

Bavaria 

The object of the game is to exert 

influence over northern Italy 

and secure the various objectives 

held by each player and these objectives 

are set up such that 

players will come into conflict at 



different points throughout 

the game 

I drew up these rules based on the other 

branch of my research 

so my day job is working on on the 

investiture contest or working on 

northern Italy more generally between 

the uh and the 11th and the 12th 

centuries and what I’ve been working on 

recently 

is looking at the relationship networks 

within northern Italy during the 

investiture contest 

and looking at how the conflict seems to 

be much more complex 

how we don't just have a simple conflict 

between the pope and the emperor 

but there are various key figures who 

are emotionally on both sides of the 

conflict 

but who are pursuing their own goals who 

have their own objectives 

which very often are at odds with those 

of the pope 

or the emperor it's a nice convenient 

time to 

my existing research and this 

this has been relatively effective so 

the students played through the game a 

couple of times 

the playthrough typically takes about 30 



minutes after you've got the rules down 

and this helps to inform their 

understanding 

of the investiture contest but what's 

most 

interesting for me is that after we've 

played through the game a couple of 

times 

I’ll have the students modify it I’ll 

have them change the rules 

and by extension change the arguments 

that the game makes 

so something that the master students 

came up with um they decided that 

Henry 

the player representing the emperor was 

losing 

too frequently it was too hard for the 

emperor to make progress 

so they gave him various advantages they 

changed his objectives to make them more 

viable for him to achieve 

basically making the argument that the 

emperor was more powerful 

was able to exert more control over this 

region 

than the initial rules suggested 

um and uh another example 

of a of a more representing debate here 

was 

another group um changed the way 



choose the way influence could be 

exerted so 

in particular they started you they 

brought in mechanics to represent the 

use of paper 

letters so the public will be able to 

be able to exert influence from a 

greater distance than any other player 

so they're sticking with the core of the 

game here but they're nuancing 

the argument that it represents by 

tweaking the mechanics 

so this is really interesting um that's 

some generally positive 

although a little bit varied feedback 

from students 

generally this went down generally the 

game went down well it's possibly just 

because it's the novelty 

of of the thing it's possibly because 

one class was dedicated 

to the use of medieval history in in 

games more generally so the 

class has greater appreciation of it 

um but it was nevertheless 

really it was really interesting to see 

how students engaged with the game and 

how they engage with the investiture 

contest in 

very different ways from how they 

normally would do in a typical class 



there were however a couple of problems 

with this approach 

so the first one of these was 

resources available to run the game so 

the way i'd set this up it required a 

large number of colored counters and a 

handful of pawns 

which is fine that was easy to get hold 

of I believe the entire thing cost me 

about five pounds that's fine 

where it got problematic though was when 

students wanted to start modding the 

games 

so the modifications students wanted to 

make on the day 

were very much restricted to the 

materials I brought with me 

so I brought along dice I bought long 

decks of cards 

but students still wanted to introduce 

new maps they wanted to introduce new 

mechanics that I 

hadn't foreseen but I hadn't got the 

resources for 

that's always going to be an issue with 

physical games you're restricted by what 

you've actually got available on the day 

the other issue which is perhaps more 

more specific 

to the times we're living in is that 

using board games 



relies on the personal presence of 

of the class this game can't 

realistically be run 

remotely and it can't realistically be 

wrong 

whilst maintaining social distancing I 

did 

play briefly with trying to print the 

map out on on 

an a piece of paper and having a 

complex system 

involving well sticks to move pieces 

around but that's not practical 

remotely 

and the solution that I’m working on for 

this 

and why these ties in to go to a session 

on 

digital approaches to teaching is I’m 

moving over 

to a digital format 

I’m using a piece of software called 

tabletop simulator 

which is produced by the worryingly 

named berserk games 

and tabletop simulator provides a lot of 

potential for me 

it allows the creation so 

it allows the creation of more or less 

any imaginable resources 

any imaginable boards and you can just 



upload images 

uses tabletops you can import all manner 

of counters 

to use within your games 

and it can represent incredibly complex 

games I should note 

that I was directed to this by um the 

genius um 

sorry Cavallo from the university of Sao 

Paulo who's been working 

using tabletop simulator on his game the 

triumphs 

of Turlough which is a game looking at well 

that's an 

Irish group of Irish clans resisting the 

English 

and this is doing this as a way of 

depicting his historical research 

so this is what I’m 

in the process of doing for this year 

I’m adapting the 

game the investiture contest game for 

computer games through tabletop 

simulator 

and the first step is to recreate the 

game 

to recreate the board game as it is so 

players can move their counters around 

they can move the pawns around they can 

place counters as and when they need to 

and they're able to interact with the 



rules 

moving beyond this I’m looking at the 

possibility of coding of the hard coding 

rules within the game so restricting 

the actions that players take automating 

some actions 

this could be particularly useful if you 

want to use dice if you want to bring a 

random element into the game 

if you want to make sure that players 

don't have to get bogged down 

looking at individual minor rules if 

they're if you want them to concentrate 

on one particular aspect of the rule set 

you can 

automate a lot of the rules looking 

longer term I’m very interested in the 

potential of creating 

more complex games with students so this 

wouldn't work 

in the format that I’m currently using 

because restrict 

we're restricted to one three-hour class 

for 

using these games um, the more i think 

this is 

potentially something that i'd like to 

do over the course of an entire module 

start off getting some students um with 

some sort of getting students some 

basic coding knowledge and then 



developing 

from there perhaps modifying uh 

existing game to broad to save time 

and to give better offer to give 

to give them nice and looking results 

let's say 

so all I’d say about this approach is 

that it requires playing 

the players have knowledge of the period 

that they're working on that you're 

working on 

which is absolutely fine something to be 

expected when 

taking any approach for history but it 

also requires a degree of ludic literacy 

from the players 

and that's something a bit harder to 

come by 

just to wrap things up then the three 

points I’d like to make so first of all 

I think games have 

a huge potential as research and 

teaching tools 

I think that there are clearly severe 

difficulties in implementation 

but I’m increasingly convinced that 

many of these difficulties can be 

overcome either for the use of board 

games or 

through the development of coding skills 

so I’ll put my details back up there 



thank you very much for having me 

thank you very much Robert for this 

interesting talk and for 

sharing your research with us. 

Now 

we will pass the word to our last 

speaker of today 

of this webinar as well that is Ainoa 

Castro Correa 

that is going to give 

a paper 

about the scribe of age playing with 6th 

to 13th Iberia manuscripts so Ainoa 

when you want okay okay 

thank you let's see if it works 

uh can we share my screen 

okay yes yes 

yeah okay and yeah great thank you 

okay uh so first of all I would like to 

still my thanks to the coordination 

committee for putting this webinar 

together 

and especially to Nerea for inviting me 

to take part on it 

I would rather not carry on by stressing 

how trying the situation we are all 

living is 

especially in Spain unfortunately 

already it is 

I will just say that initiatives like 

this one help us 



overcome the news of this a bit and for 

that thank you 

and thanks also to the other speakers 

and the silent participants 

although many of you expected to see me 

in the previous session because 

of my recently awarded ERC project 

people and writing cheers to me. 

I’m not going to talk about digital 

research but digital teaching 

the paper I have prepared to share with 

you today entitled the scribe of ages 

playing with 6th to 13th century every 

year manuscripts 

is a direct product of this uncertain 

times although the result of the work 

I’m going to talk to you about 

albeit  it seems especially 

tailored to our current context in 

teaching 

is not we for I’m the voice of a team 

have been thinking and working on it for 

some time now 

so years ago when I began teaching 

palaeography at university 

I became aware of the problems the 

students faced when dealing with it 

I was trained in an online university 

where as 

students we had around six months to go 

through a long list of basic 



bibliographic 

references a thick manual and many 

exercises 

so the in-person classes with all their 

peculiarities were new to me 

on the one hand students are shown a set 

of materials written in Latin for the 

most part of the medieval period 

manuscripts they had not seen before 

that were barely aware they existed and 

in a language they do not master 

since it's no longer mandatory in higher 

education in Spain as it was before 

they are fearful for they immediately 

feel palaeography is going to be harder than 

expected 

on the other hand, they are supposed to 

manage the art of transcription 

in a short period of time something they 

did not 

even know it was a thing and besides 

they need to understand manuscripts 

sprits and how they work from my point 

of view being able to read what a 

manuscript is about through its text 

and to transcribe it correctly is an 

important part of 

understanding and passing a palaeography course 

but is not and should not be or shown us 

the main goal of it we have very few 

weeks to teach 



students everything about manuscripts 

here in Salamanca has three weeks 

six classes to teach the medieval part 

and yes I managed to do it 

so we should focus on history of Britain 

culture on the people who wrote the 

manuscripts the people who read them 

the manuscripts themselves and their 

context 

if one understands how writing works 

through the ages 

it will be easier to learn how to deal 

with it and understand the meaning of 

written sources if we as teachers manage 

to get 

students hooked on manuscripts they will 

find the time in the future to learn the 

language and how to read it 

we cannot just expect from them to do 

all in three weeks 

mandatory class. So I began looking for a 

way to focus on manuscript culture 

during my teaching classes without 

leaving aside the aspects 

students should master but i had no time 

to teach 

mainly transcription and then I turned 

to the digital world 

many of you might be aware of the online 

transcription tools available 

like tiphen and of some of the projects 



that bring together 

people to join forces on transcribing a 

corpus 

like the general historia project some 

might even know about software being 

tested for automatic transcription like 

transcribus 

these tools were a start for what I had 

in mind but did not fit with the teacher 

requirements 

are also some online games to help with 

the tricky parts of our field 

although they exclude Iberian manuscript 

material do not allow changing the 

sources use, 

so no adaptation and the user needs to 

know the basics to be able to play them 

if I wanted to give online 

palaeographical inspired gaming a try 

ask students to complement their 

training by playing 

it needed to be really useful and 

adapted to our national teaching program 

and to do that we needed to start from 

scratch 

yes, we needed our own video game and 

that is exactly what we did 

from my point of view as I see it now 

that we are almost ready to release a 

full functional version of our game 

the project had two fundamental and 



tricky aspects to cover 

freaky aspect one our idea require 

a team and an institution crazy enough 

to want to do 

and fund this luckily that was not so 

very difficult as it seemed at first 

in the slide you can read who the 

members of the team are my thanks to all 

of them 

I would like to stress the importance of 

not only having team members from 

academia able to provide context to the 

sources selected as base for our game 

but of people who know how video games 

should be made that's an important thing 

and I’m not only referring to the 

technical part but to the inherent 

components of a gif 

of a video game as I guess will be the 

case for many of you 

I’m not  into the topic as a player but 

have never considered 

the flow of actions that were taking 

place in a game 

aimed at achieving a specific goal set 

for the player 

for the debate on this will be 

long just to say gamification 

put tasks in the form of games online 

with the sole purpose of teaching the 

player something 



is not the same as a video game in which 

the player does not have the specific 

purpose of learning 

but of achieving a goal if you want to 

do something like this 

add to the team someone who knows how to 

do it, it will make your life much easier 

tricky aspect too one cannot develop a 

video game without a very clear and 

specific idea from which to build it 

we wanted for the students to have time 

to let their brain adapt to the 

different writing systems that were 

used in every peninsula and their 

historical context 

and their own pace recognize that these 

were not the same 

in all areas of the peninsula at the 

same time 

for them to learn how radiations work 

and be able to decipher them 

and then to face the transcription with 

some confidence 

we focus first on the manuscript sources 

we were going to work with 

as you can see in the slide we selected 

one codex for each 

century one which was representative and 

not that through its incorporation it 

was 

easier for us as teachers to summarize 



the program 

we needed to cover 

we focused then on how to present the 

manuscripts and how to play with them 

our game has as it is now eight levels 

one for each codex with three 

exercises or sub levels to cover in each 

part 

by the player one on the alphabet 

another on the abbreviations 

and a final one on transcription 

we also added secret levels with 

additional information on written 

supports and materials 

and I think now is that moment when you 

are no longer listening to me and want 

to see the game 

so let me show you what the what is it 

about 

uh one thing I’m not going to talk to 

you uh through the video for it will 

i think it will take me more time to 

explain what is going on that for you to 

realize 

how it works by yourself, so i will be 

happy to answer any questions you might 

have 

at the end 

um 

[Music] 

so now the results um last year i 



designed a slightly different class for 

my medieval paleography students 

in our six classes together we talk and 

discuss 

written production, the different scripts 

their context, 

how manuscripts were made ,how people 

live with them, 

and what writing meant to people that 

instead of doing just transcriptional 

allos. 

that this kind of annoying um while as 

mandatory assignment they had to play 

our game being each student's score 

achieve 

in it the qualification they will get 

together with the final test 

just to say they were thrilled they 

began playing while in between classes 

the challenge was what they challenged 

each and over 

they passed it to the roommates and soon 

we had students from physics to classics 

playing 

we were very careful with the contents 

of the video game and to my standards 

anyone who manages to finish it has 

accomplished a fairly good level 

of palaeography each stage i don't know i 

just saw it but 

each one is a different type of script a 



different manuscript a different context 

so it's quite um full 

of information um. Some students finish 

the game in a couple of days 

and some got a higher score than mine so 

that's something I need to think about. 

our game fits within the gamification 

type as it is now 

and we are aware of that but it will 

soon be a proper video game with all 

its requirements checked so it will be 

like a civilization or something like 

that it would be really cool. 

we are working in the history behind the 

game and our 

robot that you saw before that's the 

avatar of the player 

and the the story is that he was a 

scribe 

that went to the future and then went 

back to the middle ages to 

search for clues for finding a saint or 

something like that 

so our robot this robot will be faced 

with a challenge of collecting clues in 

the form of items that we 

will help him or her so the student or 

the player 

in solving the final problem and 

finishing the game 

there will be a villain that will annoy 



our character through the game with new 

tasks on manuscript the different 

and here in the slide you can see him so 

this is our own version of Titivilus 

the demon set to work on behalf of 

Lucifer to induce the scribes to miss 

spellings 

that's a very hard rock version of it 

there will be more steps of the game 

available to the player with more 

manuscripts and context 

we will change how scores work and allow 

the player to use 

his or her points to improve their robot 

and there's a student I had last year 

who wanted to 

buy a kitten for the robots so that's 

anyway and we will have an internet to 

allow teachers to supervise how 

students are doing not just the scoring 

and many more things 

and finally our video game is free and 

will always be free for everyone to use 

and is easily adapted to other countries 

specifics to other manuscripts scripts 

and languages. 

We hope it will be made open by the end 

of the year and we love to see it being 

used 

everywhere it has shown itself to be a 

great resource for teaching especially 



when you do not have 

when you do not have as much time as 

needed 

and students really like experience 

so that's all and thank you very much 

for your time and attention. 

Thanks Ainoa for sharing with us this 

interesting video game that you have designed. 

And now is the time for questions 

so please all the people that have any 

question to make to all the panellists 

could do it now we have some you can 

do it in the q and a portal so it's your 

moment to question 

everything that you want okay. 

Not everything, everything of the field of 

course so 

we have some questions coming for 

example 

we have a question  for Robert 

from Dominique Huavenhovan that say 

thanks a lot for this is inspiring 

presentation 

are you planning to make the digital 

version of your game publicly available 

at some point ? 

um yeah 

no i'm think thanks to me It's yeah 

absolutely um 

so my understanding of it is i'll be 

able to just 



release it for free across um the 

tabletop simulator 

a home page so it's it's because it's 

out of my control but yes 

it will absolutely be released thank you 

okay  thank you  Robert it's 

another question for you 

that is more or less the same say that 

do you plan to launch the game online 

where would this be a gaming website 

your institution site 

or in other words what is in your 

opinion a good game publication and 

strategy? it is a question 

from Susana Zernankova 

um i'll be honest with you I have no 

idea how to go about 

 publishing this 

effectively 

um the plan well certainly with the 

digital game 

be accessible through tabletop simulator 

I’ve got no intentions whatsoever for 

charging at all for that um the tabletop 

version the physical version 

or all the rules the map for the various 

other bits and pieces 

should be getting made available through 

the university of Winchester 

um portal after converts 

um but yeah they should be available 



shortly um if you want them then drop me 

an email and I’ll send them over 

thanks thank you Robert. 

whereas people attendees are thinking 

about their questions 

I would like to ask to say some 

comments to 

Charrles, Charles um 

i was amazingly surprised by your  

speech because as you know a lot of 

researchers and academics say that 

Wikipedia is not useful 

for for 

teaching and for researching but 

I always use it, I mean 

I think that it's very useful to use it 

because at the end is very global and 

you have a lot of information available 

that you don't have in another way no 

and  I would like to ask you that you 

know a lot of Wikipedia um 

what percentage do you think that 

uh are incorrect 

information in wikipedia? 

do you know that is I mean I think that 

uh people who working in in who 

who update content to wikipedia normally 

are people 

to really have a base for do that you 

know 

that you are you have a 



lot of experience in that do you could 

say something about that, what is the 

percentage of people 

who do you think that make things wrong 

in Wikipedia? 

for all people are afraid for using it 

I don't know if I explain myself 

properly. um yeah I think Nerea 

and thank you for admitting that you use 

Wikipedia this is 

kind of confession time here but I think 

I mean in practice I think most people 

do 

right I mean just to check things or to 

you know um 

remind yourself of things you already 

know um just like you would use an 

encyclopaedia right I mean it is 

at its core it's just an encyclopaedia um 

and just as you might look at an 

encyclopaedia to look something up 

um that's great I mean I think in some 

ways the problem with wikipedia 

in terms of accuracy is exactly the 

problem with these encyclopaedias 

um in that often most often the problem 

is just it's very out of date 

right because as I mentioned briefly 

the main source of most wikipedia 

articles the middle ages 

is old out of copyright encyclopaedias 



all right so people have been copping 

out Britain Britannica 

especially from 1902 or whatever um and 

putting that up and those who've been 

kind of um if you've added bits and 

bobs but the kind of structure for most 

articles is actually 

um is it early 20th century few of them 

so I mean is that 

wrong um I mean it's not factual often 

it's usually it's not factually wrong 

but it is interpretively 

um out of date is what I’d say okay 

thank you Charles for 

for answering my question and whereas 

 attendees please ask any question 

that you have now because we are 

we have 10 minutes for ending the 

session so it is your moment 

And whereas i have the option to  ask 

myself 

So I have a question as well for 

Lynn 

Lynn I think that what you are sharing 

with us is very interesting 

because one problem that I 

have when I try to teach content to my 

students is that a lot of resources have 

copyright and I can't be able to use 

them in a legally way 

in a legal way so 



what do you think that institutions 

could do or 

that we as a teachers of of a higher 

level 

could do to try to express 

uh or convince another colleagues 

to the importance 

of open their resource that we have ,to 

make it 

in open access 

yeah that's a good point um uh I guess 

for most of the digital resources that I 

I was looking at anyway they are 

available um 

and I think 

in terms of trying to convince our own 

colleagues to make their things 

more available it just seems obvious to 

me that 

you would you would want more people to 

you know do you really want five people 

to read your article you know which is 

basically the reality of the situation 

or would you would you like for 

it to be available to a lot of different 

people so 

most of these databases I know there are 

some 

granting agencies that require you to 

make it open source 

if um open source and open 



access to the data if you 

use that that grant so that's a that's a 

good approach but 

I just think more probably awareness 

and more encouragement from 

colleagues will be very helpful um 

when it comes to using things in class 

that are under copyright 

I try to I try to buy a couple of copies 

let's say it's a video game which I like 

to use in class 

um I think they're great and uh if you 

um yeah I’ve used for instance 

Assassin's Creed 

so you you buy that you want the 

students to play it or play little parts 

of it and 

um you know I just get maybe five copies 

and put it on the lab computers and have 

students use it there 

or I’ve also had a situation where and I 

know you're not supposed to do this but 

uh you have a stream account and you just 

give you know 

say it's an account for your class and 

you may maybe have five of them and 

you tell the students okay yeah you can 

only play one person at a time 

but you this group of students you know 

you all use 

the same account so that's kind of how I 



handle it 

um and it seems to work pretty well i'm 

sure there's 

people who would object but that's what 

I do. 

thank you very much for sharing your 

your method is very important 

for I think that all the early scholars 

or 

researchers that like me that are 

learning of you, so 

thank you very much for sharing this and 

um uh 

I want to say that if between us or 

between you between 

speaker have any question to all to all 

the speakers you could ask 

then okay so 

I think that we don't have more question 

in the q a 

um on a q a portal so 

Ainoa a have a question for you okay 

okay we have a few 

question  in  the Q and A thanks people  

A have a question 

for Ainoa is from Paula 

that said I would like to play the game 

but can you tell me where I can find the 

useful materials? 

yes so you can send me an emal 

you can send me an email and i will give 



you access so now 

the app is online so anyone can play and 

in fact the university of Bristol is 

going to use it this 

this term so like it's going to be 

massive 

because we'll be there the music 

students that 

are going to test it but anyway so it's 

usable for everyone if you want to try 

it just let me know and I will I will 

give you the password 

that you will need to to get access to 

it 

but the other way you can just play so 

it's just send to me an email i will send it 

to you 

okay thank you i know are there more 

questions if not 

we are going to end this this webinar 

okay  I´ve got question okay um actually to 

to Ainoa 

anywhere again I noticed that you 

gathered data on the gender 

aspects of your game and like of of and 

how 

men and women um reacted to it 

differently 

um yes why why did he was why did you do 

that and did it surprise you what you 

found? 



well it I think well it was surprising I 

think to me 

because uh well I cannot see it now but 

I think that for male students the 

playability of the game was boring so 

they thought it was too easy 

whereas for female students they thought 

it was 

not easy so and not hard but just enough 

the slightly hard for for 

for them to realize how to play it and 

if you look at the results for the 

aesthetics part 

the female students like it more than 

the male students 

so you know it's just I think I did it 

just for fun I 

wasn't expecting to get some significant 

results 

but I think you know when you design a 

video game you need to know 

the audience um for which you are 

designing it 

so for us I think it is important to 

be aware of what our students will be 

looking for 

so I may need to do a slightly harder 

version 

for more advanced students and a 

livelier 

prettier one for other ones so they 



get engaged and they don't lose that 

enthusiasm for playing the game 

Thank you Ainoa can i just ask um a quick 

One for the the same question i guess 

similar question to Robert did you do 

you find that 

that there's a kind of a breakdown in 

the students um 

I guess engagement with the game 

yeah I’m sorry about one on gender basis 

you mean 

sorry yeah um yeah it's strangely not 

um so with the with the middle ages and 

computer games class the student body 

skews very heavily male so typically 

we're talking about 90 percent of the 

class 

is male then typically with most of most 

of our modules is 60 

female um and I’m doing various things 

to try and mitigate that but 

generally speaking though within the 

masters module will not expect when the 

game's just an ancillary part of the 

course 

um it's been going down about as well 

with male and female students 

so uh this I think I think this 

I think will be building what I was 

saying um it's 

male and female men and women are almost 



conditioned to 

like different things in games I think 

and I think 

the tabletop game kind of takes off the 

edge of all the first person 

shooter fast action that men have been 

told this is what you will play because 

it's manly 

um and maybe I don't know there's 

definitely something in there but I’m 

very glad that it's 

nice and flat 

Thank you thank you Tobert and there are 

a lot of people that are interested in 

having your email 

contact, I think that is 

for ask your question after so if you don't 

have any problem i will send it by mail okay your email 

direction okay thank you okay thank you 

to all for stay here 

 is if there is not more question 

i think that we are going to the end of 

this ah sorry 

Charles have question for Aino 

too uh 

Charles says Nerea 

I’ve already asked it Nerea I've asked it 

already that was yes that was the 

question i asked oh okay okay yeah 

So thank you very much to all for a stay 

today here 



with me and i'm afraid that is the end 

of our our time so 

we have to close right now this webinar 

okay thank you very very much for coming 

it was a great pleasure to have you here 

and all the panellists for accepting invitation 

and for attendance for 

stay with us thanks to uh 

to all and of course thank you to the 

society for the medieval Mediterranean 

to make this webinar possible 

and become reality through this this 

prize 

um I will remind to you that uh 

the recording will be available soon 

the recording of this webinar 

i contact you by email and i will say 

where the recording 

will be available okay so you can rewatch it 

or to recommend to someone or spread it 

in general, spread medieval history 

please 

that is very important okay and all the 

best I hope to see you soon and that you 

learn as much as I have learned thank 

you very much for all 

and bye thank you.