Digitising the Event: Digital Approaches to the Peasant's Revolt 1381

Digital Humanities annual lecture at University of Kent
Professor Andrew Prescott, Head of Department of Digital Humanities, King's College, London

Digitised archives need to be "different shapes", not just digitised versions of 19th century initiatives and printed calendars. 

Digitised archives need to convey the uncertainty and "layering " of events. Users want to be able to engage with the images to build up the story and the layers.  For instance, you want to detect later insertions and additions to the original, link to other documents and to images of objects. 

Historical events tend to be referred to as centralised and as having a focus, but in fact they were often dispersed and dislocated. The participants were unlikely to have had a sense of a particular pivotal moment or symbolic image. This is reflected in the archives.  For example, information about the Peasant's Revolt is spread across a whole range of archives: King's Bench, Common Pleas, Gaol Delivery, Parliamentary Rolls as well as records of Chancery and Exchequer, local town and manorial records, chronicle writing and informal letters and records.

The great opportunity of digitisation is that it makes connections possible

But emphasis has so far been on digitisation of national archives rather than local, probably because of funding. There are very few digitised manorial or town records