Modeling Memories of Conflict: Understanding Memory and Space in Medieval Biography Using Corpus Linguistics and Network Analysis

That miracles play a role in medieval saints' lives is no surprise. Triangulating the interplay between miracles, the conflict those miracles resolves, and the memorialization of those conflicts and their miracles is less straightforward. Kalani Craig’s larger project charts a course through the connections between miracle, memory, and conflict using a combination of corpus linguistics and topic modeling to examine the shifts of these separate linguistic concepts in holy biography between the 6th and 12th century, and network analysis and visualization to explore the connections between these concepts as they change over time. This paper looks specifically at the built environment and its effect on authorial borrowing of memorialization tropes. While explicit in the reading aloud of saints' lives and episcopal biography for early and central medieval audiences, exhortations to remember are implicit in the language of the texts themselves. Instead, the direct memorialization of miracles were bound into the space that surrounds a miracle working by way of the church, and the bishops who built the physical structures that represent the church in the world. A blend of digital methods allows Craig to better understand the relationships between medieval holy men, their miracles and the physical memorials such miracles created in both physical place and cognitive space as miracle tropes moved from biography to biography.