News

13 May

Sebastian Kheml, Tomáš Glomb, and Aleš Chalupa employed spatial analysis to uncover a possible link between malaria and healing cults in Roman Italy

A new study by Sebastian Kheml, Tomáš Glomb, and Aleš Chalupa published in Open Archaeology focuses on the previously unexplored relationship between healing cults dedicated to the gods Asclepius and Apollo, and the risk of malaria in present-day Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia.

4 May

OP JAK CoRe welcomes visiting researchers for 3-8 month stays

The Johannes Amos Commenius OP project “Beyond Security: Role of Conflict in Resilience-Building” invites doctoral, postdoctoral or senior researchers to apply for 3–8‑month salaried visiting stay, focused on the semantic annotation and computational analysis of hate speech in medieval antiheretical literature.

17 Apr

Coding a heresy trial, one clause at a time

Our new article published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities uses the trial record of Bernard-Oth of Niort and his family to demonstrate the benefits of Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling (CASTEMO), a custom approach that not only captures informational content but also its discursive and contextual embedding.

19 Feb

Medieval anti-heretical hate speech: Support in submitting a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc application (MSCA-PF), expression of interest by 16 March 2026

Doctoral graduates are invited to apply for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action postdoctoral fellowship (MSCA-PF) within our digital humanities project using large‑scale computational methods to study medieval hate speech and anti‑heretical discourse. Send us a preliminary research proposal by 16 March 2026.

19 Feb

Medieval anti-heretical hate speech: Funded Ph.D. opportunity, deadline for expressions of interest: 16 March 2026

M.A. graduates are invited to apply for fully funded Ph.D. studies within our digital humanities project using large‑scale computational methods to study medieval hate speech and anti‑heretical discourse. Send us a preliminary research proposal by 16 March 2026.

13 Feb

DISSINET researcher Katia Riccardo completes doctoral dissertation

Katia Riccardo's doctoral dissertation, "A computational analysis of inquisitorial language and relationship networks in the inquisition register of Bologna (1291-1310)", is now available online. It offers the most comprehensive digital humanities study to date of the Bologna inquisition register, one of the richest surviving sources for inquisitorial activity in medieval Italy.

12 Feb

How inquisitive was medieval inquisition?

Kaarel Sikk, David Zbíral, and Reima Välimäki have published a new study in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities that examines how Peter Zwicker's inquisition in Stettin (1393–94) utilised information gathered from deponent testimonies over the course of subsequent interrogations. The analysis of network and temporal data offers a fresh perspective on strategic decision-making by inquisitors.

6 Feb

Ondřej Homolka defended his thesis and got a PhD

On February 5 2026, Ondřej Homolka defended the thesis Spatial Dynamics of the Cult of Mary in Late Antiquity and passed successfully the State exam.

Events

25 Mar

CEDRR lecture by Dr. Paul Robertson

4:00 PM

Centre for the Digital Research of Religion would like to invite you to a lecture delivered by Dr. Paul Robertson (University of New Hampshire) with the title "Quantifying ancient religious literature: Computational case studies in early Christianity".

25 Mar

CEDRR talk: From Archives to Algorithms: Digital Methods for Studying Imperial Commoners of Brazil and West Africa (1640-1822)

10:00 AM

Join the DISSINET team for another CEDRR talk as Agata Bloch from the Polish Academy of Sciences demonstrates how algorithms, archival research, and critical digital humanities approaches transform our understanding of everyday people in Brazil and West Africa during the Portuguese Empire. Demival Vasques Filho from the University of Luxembourg will discuss further aspects of digital humanities research.

9 Mar

Zoltán Brys lecture on Multilayer Network Analysis

1:00 PM

DISSINET member Zoltán Brys will give a lecture on "Multilayer Network Analysis of Gender-Stratified Inquisitorial Testimonies" as part of the Historical Network Research (HNR) Community Spring 2026 Series.

28 Jan

Irene Bueno: “The worst of all oriental schismatics”: lists of errors and polemical works against Eastern Christians, 14th-15th century

10:00 AM

DISSINET project team cordially invites you to the lecture given by Irene Bueno from the University of Bologna in which she examines polemical texts that sought to define—and condemn—Eastern Christians in the late Middle Ages.

12 Nov 2025

CEDRR talk. Webs of Dissent: Inquisitorial Registers and Social Network Analysis for a Socio-Cultural History of Medieval Heresy

10:00 AM – 11:30 AM

CEDRR is pleased to welcome Roberto Mussinatto, who will present his doctoral research using social network analysis to explain the workings of medieval inquisitorial investigations and the networks of religious dissent.

22 Oct 2025

Mock-defense of Katia Riccardo's doctoral thesis

2:30 PM

CEDRR cordially invites you to a mock defense of Katia Riccardo's forthcoming doctoral thesis titled "A computational analysis of inquisitorial language and relationship networks in the inquisition register of Bologna (1291-1310)"

29 May 2025

CEDRR talk: Analyzing non-local influence processes in dynamic networks

4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

DISSINET team invites you to a guest lecture on dynamic networks by Daniel Gotthardt from Universität Hamburg, Fakultät für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften. Colleagues unaffiliated with Masaryk University are welcome to attend online.

6 Nov 2024

CEDRR guest lecture "Political Networks: What Are They and How Do They Matter?"

4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Dr. Petr Ocelík from the Department of International Relations and European Studies, Masaryk University, will illustrate how social network analysis, as a methodological and metatheoretical framework, contributes to a better understanding of the political world.

25 Oct 2024

Gender and Heresy lecture by David Zbíral at the University of Bologna

5:00 PM – 7:00 PM

David Zbíral is giving a lecture, with the option of online participation, on “Gender and heresy: Actions of men and women in corpus data from twenty-five inquisition registers” at the University of Bologna.

22 May 2024

CEDRR talk "RELIC: A Digital Approach to Christianisation and the Everyday People on the Eastern Fringes of the Ottonian-Salian Empire"

11:00 AM – 1:00 PM

Medievalist and archaeologist Mária Vargha from the University of Vienna will talk about her project focused on comparative investigation of the Christianisation processes in East-Central Europe.

15 May 2024

CEDRR talk: Unpeeling the layers of inquisition trial records with CASTEMO (Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling)

4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Robert Shaw from the DISSINET project will present the potential of Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling (CASTEMO) in analyzing spatial coverage, punishment strategy, and narration in the register of Peter Seila, 1241-2.

25 Apr 2024

CEDRR and LEVYNA guest lecture "Cognition and Rituals in the Cult of Mithras - A New Theoretical Approach"

4:00 PM

Dr. Blanka Misic from the University of Vienna, Austria (Institut für Klassische Archäologie), will deliver a lecture focusing on the topic of ritual practices and the range of religious experiences that occurred within Mithraic religious communities in the Roman Empire.

17 May 2023

CEDRR talk: "Challenges of interactive mapping of Western-European heresy (1000-1150)"

10:00 AM

Lidia Hinz-Wieczorek from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań will talk you through the challenges she and her DISSINET collaborators experienced while trying to map early heresy in Western Europe and mark the official launch of the interactive map application.

9 May 2023

CEDRR guest lecture "Networked Antiquity: Texts, Archaeology, Environment"

4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Prof. Eivind Heldaas Seland from the University of Bergen, Norway (Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion), will deliver a lecture focusing on the topic of entanglements and dependencies between civilization and the surrounding environment in antiquity using the perspective of network theory.

9 Dec 2022

CEDRR hands-on seminar: Computational approaches to semantic change

9:30 AM – 3:00 PM

Dr. Vojtěch Kaše from the Computing Culture & Society Laboratory (CCS-Lab, University of West Bohemia) will lead a hands-on seminar focusing on the topic of analyzing semantic changes in large textual corpora and will introduce to the participants a particular computational methodological framework.

30 Nov 2022

CEDRR guest lecture "Mapping seismic gods in the ancient Mediterranean"

4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Dr. Sabine Neumann from the Marburg Center for the Ancient World (MCAW, University of Marburg) and Dr. Tomáš Glomb (CEDRR, Masaryk University) will present their ongoing research that tackles the question of "How seismic activity in the ancient Mediterranean could have shaped the worship of deities in the region?" by using the synergy between established historiographical approaches and quantitative methods.

30 Nov 2022

CEDRR talk: "Florentine Political Debates, 1349-1492. A Social and Semantic Analysis"

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Katalin Prajda from the University of Vienna will talk us through her research on the Florentine Consulte e Pratiche records of policy discussion held by the local political elite and explain her work with archives as well as social and semantic networks.

9 Nov
10 Nov 2022

CEDRR talk: "An integral socio-semantic network approach to symbolic construction of culture"

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Nikita Basov from Saint Petersburg University / Bielefeld University will present socio-semantic network approach as part of CEDRR talks and the DISSINET project in a lecture and a following hands-on workshop.

14 Apr 2022

CEDRR talk: "Insights from the RIP Project: Simulating Secularising Societies between Norway and Poland"

4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

The PI of the research project "Religion, Ideology & Prosociality: Simulating Secularising Societies", Konrad Talmont-Kamiński will give a talk about their approach to modelling secularisation - a complex, multi-level phenomenon - using agent-based computational models.

13 Apr 2022

CEDRR talk: "Discussion on Big Data and Network Research in the Traditional Historiography of the Portuguese Colonial Empire"

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

The Centre for the Digital Study of Religion invites you to their online dicussion: Dr. Agata Bloch (Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences), and Dr. Demival Vasques Filho (Leibniz Institute for European History, Germany) will talk about analysis of historical data through cutting-edge machine learning algorithms to reconstruct and model large temporal social networks of the Portuguese Empire.

23 Mar 2022

CEDRR talk: "An adapted ontology for a prosopography of medieval Sardinia: RDF schemes, OWL and an open linked database"

3:00 PM – 5:00 PM

The Centre for the Digital Research of Religion invites you to a lecture by by Hervin Fernández Aceves from the University of Lancaster on the topic of RDF schemes, OWL and open linked database.

12 Jan 2022

CEDRR talk: "Materialising Religions in Secret Police Archives: Methodological Insights and Results of the Hidden Galleries ERC project"

12:00 PM – 2:00 PM

Let us invite you to the talk by James Kapaló from University College Cork, Ireland, who will present the theoretical and methodological approaches of the Hidden Galleries project (ERC Project no. 677355), give an account of the research process and principal outputs.

19 Oct 2021

Computational approaches in the study of pre-modern religion

10:00 AM – 1:00 PM

Would you like to learn more about digital humanities techniques focused on premodern sources? Participate in our workshop with several members of the Dissident Network Project and guests. The event is part of 100th anniversary of the Faculty of Arts and will be streamed on Zoom.

18 Jun 2021

Workshop by Tomáš Marek: "Basic principles of data visualization in academic practice"

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

We cordially invite you to the data visualisation workshop by Tomáš Marek, which accompanies the previous talk.

17 Jun 2021

Invited talk: "Basic principles of data visualization in academic practice" (Tomáš Marek, KISK)

4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

We cordially invite you to the open data visualisation lecture by Tomáš Marek, who will talk about basic principles and the sufficient and insufficient qualities in visual scholarly communication.

3 Jun 2021

Invited talk from SDAM project: "Building the Ship of Theseus: Co-developing Open-Source Infrastructure for Reproducible Research"

11:00 AM

We cordially invite you to a zoom talk by dr. Adéla Sobotková a dr. Vojtěch Kaše, which covers experiences from developing collaborative infrastructure and data management workflows from the SDAM "Social Dynamics in the Ancient Mediterranean" Project based in Aarhus University.

31 Mar 2020

Introduction to CTA with Dr. Vojtěch Kaše

10:00 AM – 4:00 PM

We cordially invite you to the webinar about Computational Text Analysis with Dr. Vojtěch Kaše, CEDRR member and postdoc researcher at the SDAM Project (Aarhus University).

News

News

Sebastian Kheml, Tomáš Glomb, and Aleš Chalupa employed spatial analysis to uncover a possible link between malaria and healing cults in Roman Italy

OP JAK CoRe welcomes visiting researchers for 3-8 month stays

Coding a heresy trial, one clause at a time

Medieval anti-heretical hate speech: Support in submitting a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc application (MSCA-PF), expression of interest by 16 March 2026

Medieval anti-heretical hate speech: Funded Ph.D. opportunity, deadline for expressions of interest: 16 March 2026

DISSINET researcher Katia Riccardo completes doctoral dissertation

How inquisitive was medieval inquisition?

Ondřej Homolka defended his thesis and got a PhD

Events

Past events Show current

CEDRR lecture by Dr. Paul Robertson

CEDRR talk: From Archives to Algorithms: Digital Methods for Studying Imperial Commoners of Brazil and West Africa (1640-1822)

Zoltán Brys lecture on Multilayer Network Analysis

Irene Bueno: “The worst of all oriental schismatics”: lists of errors and polemical works against Eastern Christians, 14th-15th century

CEDRR talk. Webs of Dissent: Inquisitorial Registers and Social Network Analysis for a Socio-Cultural History of Medieval Heresy

Mock-defense of Katia Riccardo's doctoral thesis

CEDRR talk: Analyzing non-local influence processes in dynamic networks

CEDRR guest lecture "Political Networks: What Are They and How Do They Matter?"

Gender and Heresy lecture by David Zbíral at the University of Bologna

CEDRR talk "RELIC: A Digital Approach to Christianisation and the Everyday People on the Eastern Fringes of the Ottonian-Salian Empire"

CEDRR talk: Unpeeling the layers of inquisition trial records with CASTEMO (Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling)

CEDRR and LEVYNA guest lecture "Cognition and Rituals in the Cult of Mithras - A New Theoretical Approach"

CEDRR talk: "Challenges of interactive mapping of Western-European heresy (1000-1150)"

CEDRR guest lecture "Networked Antiquity: Texts, Archaeology, Environment"

CEDRR hands-on seminar: Computational approaches to semantic change

CEDRR guest lecture "Mapping seismic gods in the ancient Mediterranean"

CEDRR talk: "Florentine Political Debates, 1349-1492. A Social and Semantic Analysis"

CEDRR talk: "An integral socio-semantic network approach to symbolic construction of culture"

CEDRR talk: "Insights from the RIP Project: Simulating Secularising Societies between Norway and Poland"

CEDRR talk: "Discussion on Big Data and Network Research in the Traditional Historiography of the Portuguese Colonial Empire"

CEDRR talk: "An adapted ontology for a prosopography of medieval Sardinia: RDF schemes, OWL and an open linked database"

CEDRR talk: "Materialising Religions in Secret Police Archives: Methodological Insights and Results of the Hidden Galleries ERC project"

Computational approaches in the study of pre-modern religion

Workshop by Tomáš Marek: "Basic principles of data visualization in academic practice"

Invited talk: "Basic principles of data visualization in academic practice" (Tomáš Marek, KISK)

Invited talk from SDAM project: "Building the Ship of Theseus: Co-developing Open-Source Infrastructure for Reproducible Research"

Introduction to CTA with Dr. Vojtěch Kaše