This is the presentation file at JADH2024 about making an online dictionary of Kelabit, an indigenous language spoken in Borneo Island.
This presentation reports the case of compiling online dictionary with help of NLP technologies including chatGPT.

The present study introduces an ongoing project of the present author that aims to produce an online dictionary of Kelabit (ODK hence forth), an endangered Austronesian language spoken in Malaysia. In particular, the report focuses on the unique approach taken by the present author in compiling ODK, highlighting how Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology played an active role in the process of compiling ODK. Specifically, it will be discussed how using ChatGPT enables a non-expert of NLP, including the present author, to generate an online dictionary with a search function.

Bioarchaeological studies have provided important information about mortality patterns during the second pandemic of plague, including the Black Death, but most to date have focused on European contexts. This study represents a spatial contribution to plague bioarchaeology, focusing on Central Asia, the origin of the second pandemic. We examine the relationship between stature and plague mortality during an outbreak of plague at Kara-Djigach in northern Kyrgyzstan in 1338–1339, the earliest archaeological site known to contain victims of the Black Death in Eurasia.

This article looks at the demographic contours and impact of the pestis secunda—the second wave of the Second Plague Pandemic—which ravaged England and Wales in 1361–62. The study is based on a rich corpus of statistical data deriving from manorial records—primarily court rolls, but also inquisitions postmortem and episcopal registers—on a national level. A close analysis of the data reveals that the wave in question tended to discriminate across regions, socioeconomic statuses, and genders. The study's findings are then considered within a wider context of ongoing historiographical debates related to the total size of the English population before and after the Black Death. It argues that the population size of England on the eve of the Black Death was higher than often argued, and that the impact of the pestis secundawas harsher than often assumed. The evidence suggests that it was the pestis secunda, rather than the Black Death, that had severe, long‐term demographic and socioeconomic repercussions for England and Wales.

Early modern England was a world of wood. Everyone from laity to elite had a vested interest in woodland resources because it was a necessity for all aspects of life from warmth, fuel, shelter, transportation, and industry. Starting in the late fifteenth century and lasting through the early modern period, anxieties about timber scarcity spread as the Royal Navy complained of shortages. Since the Royal Navy was responsible for the protection of the Kingdom and was an integral part of England’s colonial exploits abroad, the possibility that the maintenance of the fleet was at risk was cause for grave concern.

Through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Royal Navy accused merchant ship builders, agriculturalists, woodland industrialists, and private woodland owners of fomenting shortages through careless destruction of woodlands for profit, leading to a “timber famine”. Although most naval timber that furnished the Royal Navy came from private estates, historians have focussed on management in the Royal Forests. This thesis investigates how private woodland owners in the Weald, who owned most of the wood and timber reserves in southeast England managed their most essential resource. Private landowners’ interests directly conflicted with the interests of the Royal Navy, yet ultimately it was not the landowners who were responsible for perceived timber shortages. However, an inability to reconcile these competing interests contribute to historic myths about the state of England’s woodlands in the early modern period.

Through an in-depth HGIS (Historical Geographic Information System) study, this thesis argues that private landowners in the Weald were motivated by profit to sustainably maintain their woodlands. They chose to manage their woodlands with a preference for local underwood economies rather than timber because they were the most lucrative and thriving markets, much to the behest of the Royal Navy. I argue that the Royal Navy’s inability to procure timber during this period was due to lack of funds, disorganization within the Navy Board, and poor Royal Forest management which ultimately left them unable to keep up with the competitive timber market and provided more motivation for landowners to give preference to local underwood economies. Additionally, this thesis argues that timber scarcity in the Weald did not result in woodland destruction. In fact, the case study on Glassenbury demonstrates that Wealden landowners’ sustainable management was largely responsible for the maintenance of Wealden woods to this day.

Excavations at Street House between 2016-2022 unearthed evidence for Neolithic salt making and settlement at Street House, near Loftus, occurring 6,000 years ago. In 2023, we aimed to understand more about the Neolithic activity at Street House, to find out if salt manufacture was occurring elsewhere in the area and to gauge how the process worked.

In recent years (2016–22), I have been undertaking excavations on a Neolithic saltern at Street House (Sherlock 2021). Indeed, some readers will recall some earlier excavations at Street House that revealed the evidence for Iron Age salt making at the site (Sherlock & Vyner 2013). It was with that information about a potential pattern of salt manufacture at the site that led to a critical evaluation of the geophysics to assess the potential for other salterns. Further work by James Lawton (AoC Archaeology) suggested there were other locations indicative of kilns or salterns. 

The World Shakespeare Bibliography Online is a searchable electronic database consisting of the most comprehensive record of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide from 1960 to the present.

The Digital Collections for the Classroom (DCC) project makes primary sources from the Newberry’s collection accessible and useful for educators, students, and families. The site offers a variety of free, high-quality resources: 

• Inquiry-based Lesson Plans and Activities are designed for grab-and-go classroom use.  
• Collection Essays written by subject specialists introduce topics and provide curated primary source sets.  
• Skills Lessons teach students foundational historical-thinking skills necessary to analyze primary sources.  
• Resources that explain the pedagogical concepts behind our lessons.

The World of Dante is a multi-media research tool intended to facilitate the study of the Divine Comedy through a wide range of offerings. These include an encoded Italian text which allows for structured searches and analyses, an English translation, interactive maps, diagrams, music, a database, timeline and gallery of illustrations. Many of these features allow users to engage the poem dynamically through the integrated components of this site.

The WordHoard project is named after an Old English phrase for the verbal treasure 'unlocked' by a wise speaker. It applies to highly canonical literary texts the insights and techniques of corpus linguistics, that is to say, the empirical and computer-assisted study of large bodies of written texts or transcribed speech. In the WordHoard environment, such texts are annotated or tagged by morphological, lexical, prosodic, and narratological criteria. They are mediated through a 'digital page' or user interface that lets scholarly but non-technical users explore the greatly increased query potential of textual data kept in such a form.

Women Writers Online is a full-text collection of early women’s writing in English, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. It includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible. The range of genres and topics covered makes it a truly remarkable resource for teaching and research, providing an unparalleled view of women’s literate culture in the early modern period.

Since 2008, the ‘Who were the nuns?’ project team has been investigating the membership of the English convents in exile, from the opening of the first institution in Brussels to the nuns’ return to England as a result of the French Revolution and associated violence.

Most were enclosed convents, in theory cut off from the outside world. However in practice the nuns were not isolated and their contacts and networks spread widely.

On this website you will find a database of the membership, family trees, edited documents, maps and analysis of the nuns’ experiences.

WEMLO provides a meeting place for researchers of early modern women letter writers. Created initially with British Academy/Leverhulme funding and supported by the Cultures of Knowledge project, WEMLO is a resource and discussion forum for all of the early modern women’s correspondence held within the EMLO catalogue.

WCopyfind is an open source windows-based program that compares documents and reports similarities in their words and phrases. It is free and available to anyone. It is licensed under the Gnu Public License, which basically means that you can do whatever you like with it except to try to sell it to someone else.

The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project  provides the experience of hearing John Donne’s sermon for Gunpowder Day, November 5th, 1622 in Paul’s Churchyard, the specific physical location for which it was composed. The user can hear Donne’s sermon from 8 different positions in Paul’s Churchyard and in the presence of 4 different sizes of crowd. Using digital modeling technology, we can experience preaching in Paul’s Churchyard as an event that unfolds over time.

HMML Reading Room (vhmml.org) offers resources for the study of manuscripts and currently features manuscript cultures from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. The site houses high-resolution images of manuscripts, many of them digitized as part of the global mission of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), Collegeville, MN, to preserve and share important, endangered, and inaccessible manuscript collections through digital photography, archiving, and cataloging. It also contains descriptions of manuscripts from HMML's legacy microfilm collection, with scans of some of these films.

Verse Miscellanies Online is a searchable critical edition of seven printed verse miscellanies published in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Beginning with Tottel’s Miscellany, published in 1557, the printed poetry miscellanies helped to establish a vernacular lyric tradition in England and shape the history of English poetry. In each year of Elizabeth’s reign, one miscellany was either printed or reprinted. The verse miscellanies can tell us much about how literary tastes were shaped and changed, the proximity of elite and popular forms, the influence of music on the development of the lyric, developments in versification and literary conventions, and the growth of the book trade in England.