M-PATCH is a reusable modular platform for the multidisciplinary annotation of historical texts that
distinguishes itself from other such platforms on three accounts, namely (a) it applies to historical
texts regardless of their chronological and societal context of origin; (b) it enables parallel annotation
of images and transcriptions of all extant versions of a text in the material record, to chart historical,
linguistic, philological, and material variation across space and time; and (c) interlinks annotations
from four fields of expertise: history, linguistics, literary and philological studies, and material
studies, as well as metadata and material witnesses through Linked Data and IIIF technologies.
The project is situated at the intersection of historical, linguistic, philological, and literary annotated historical texts to reliably and transparently identify, disambiguate, and contextualize research, the study of written practices, and Digital Humanities. As research in the Humanities becomes increasingly data-intensive and interconnected, scholars recognize the necessity of linking data according to FAIR principles (making them findable, accessible, interoperable and thus reusable) for multiple applications across disciplinary boundaries.
M-PATCH breaks new ground because of (i) its innovative Linked Data model integrating through
APIs the multidisciplinary data produced through domain-specific annotation, merging them in a
machine-readable triple store with a user-friendly front-end; (ii) the fact that it operationalizes
theoretical reflections on the fluidity and plurality of texts in the material record; and (iii) its
applicability to any corpus of texts, regardless of the chronological, societal, cultural, linguistic, or
other origins.
To submit a proof of concept, the infrastructure will be tested and developed on a corpus of medieval Latin hagiographies (texts about saints’ lives, miracles, and cults) as they are paradigms of textual fluidity but so far have eluded multidisciplinary attention. Constantly reworked to address evolving needs, hagiographies were transmitted over an extremely long chronological timescale, with manuscripts and editions spanning ten centuries or more, and show very broad geographical reach, crossing political, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. The dynamic nature of this transmission adds to the exceptionally high variation (chronologically, regionally, in terms of use) in orthography, morphology, syntax, composition, and content. The richness and depth of the interlinked multidisciplinary annotations of this prototype will allow us to test the robustness of such data and refine annotation methods.
The project is made possible through funding from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) through a medium size infrastructure grant (2026-2030), the FWO senior research project Hagiographic Entanglements of the Long Tenth Century, and the BOF (UGent) research project Language Variation in Latin Hagiography of the Long Tenth Century.