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.

18 Dec 2025

DISSICON: DISSINET lexico-semantic dataset now online

We have published the DISSICON dataset (which stands for DISSINET Conceptual Network), offering an ontology for analysing medieval inquisition records and other trial documents. It formalizes actions, concepts, and their relationships to support computational analyses of historical material.

16 Dec 2025

How do trial records tell stories of heresy? A computational analysis of narrative in Peter Seila's 1241-42 inquisition register

15 Dec 2025

Papal inquest from Doat 32 and other Doat materials published

New transcriptions from the Doat collection were published by the DISSINET team, including the papal inquest preserved in Doat 32 and additional material shedding light on inquisitorial practices and dissident networks in medieval Languedoc.

12 Dec 2025

Occupation, socioeconomic status, and dissidence in medieval Bologna revisited

In an innovative new article published in Reti Medievali Rivista, Katia Riccardo, David Zbíral, and Zoltán Brys provide new insights into the occupation and socioeconomic status of religious dissidents found in the inquisition register from Bologna.

4 Oct 2025

DISSINET publishes a transcription of the inquisition register of John Galand and William of Saint-Seine, 1283–1302

As part of DISSINET's corpus work, we have procured a transcription of the hitherto unpublished register of John Galand and William of Saint-Seine, 1283–1302, that we have made available in the Zenodo repository.

3 Oct 2025

Extracting data from historical texts using Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise for extracting information from historical texts. If used appropriately, they can speed up the research process, compensating for resource limitations and helping researchers achieve ambitious objectives in quantitative cultural history.

3 Oct 2025

DISSINET during summer 2025: conferences, workshops, and success at a competition on detecting hate speech

This summer, DISSINET team members attended five international conferences and two summer schools, showcasing the diversity of our research efforts and motivation to learn and apply new methodologies.

23 Jun 2025

Medieval anti-heretical hate speech: Funded Ph.D. opportunity, deadline 31 July 2025

DISSINET is offering support to M.A. graduates applying for fully funded Ph.D. studies focusing on medieval anti-heretical hate speech using digital and quantitative methods. Send us a preliminary research proposal by 31 July 2025.

2 Jun 2025

DISSINET publishes most comprehensive statement of its research agenda

The article recently published in Acta Historica Tallinnensia argues for the importance of integrating digital history methods with source criticism and highlights DISSINET's contributions to this field.

16 May 2025

DISSINET Data on Witchcraft Trials featured on Aktuálně.cz

Our comprehensive dataset of witchcraft trials in Czech lands has been utilised by the popular online publication Aktuálně.cz to create a new map.

1 Apr 2025

Medieval anti-heretical hate speech: Support in submitting a Marie Skłodowska Curie postdoc application (MSCA-PF)

DISSINET is searching for Ph.D. graduates inerested in applying for a post-doc position focusing on medieval anti-heretical hate speech using digital and quantitative methods. Send us a preliminary research proposal by 15 April 2025.

31 Mar 2025

Medieval anti-heretical hate speech: Funded Ph.D. opportunity

DISSINET is offering support to M.A. graduates applying for fully funded Ph.D. studies focusing on medieval anti-heretical hate speech using digital and quantitative methods. Send us a preliminary research proposal by 15 April 2025.

31 Mar 2025

DISSINET is now on Bluesky and Mastodon

Stay up to date with DISSINET news by following our new social media accounts.

12 Feb 2025

Gender patterns in medieval heresy incriminations

Examining an extensive register of inquisition from Bologna, 1291-1310, we found that women tended to incriminate other women, while men incriminated across genders.

27 May 2024

Did medieval inquisitors fear accusations of sexual misconduct?

It is a familiar image: a woman in distress, surrounded by men examining her soul in a dimly lit inquisitorial chamber. In fear of physical torture, she confesses to crimes she never committed. We bring you an online version of our article originally published in History Today.

10 Apr 2024

Map: Heresy and occupation in Bologna around 1300

DISSINET has developed an interactive map of the occupations, dissident religious affiliations, and locations of residence of nearly 900 persons suspected of heresy in the inquisition register of Bologna, 1291–1310.

29 Mar 2024

Towards a corpus of medieval inquisition records: First numbers

Building upon the invaluable work of modern editors, the DISSINET project is building a textual corpus of medieval inquisitorial material, which now contains 15 registers, totals over 1.6 million tokens, and ranges from North-Central Italy through Languedoc to England, and from the 1230s until the 1520s.

6 Feb 2024

DISSINET’s article on the spatiality of heresy prosecutions published in Springer Nature’s Humanities and Social Science Communications

DISSINET has published a new article on toponymic surnames and the spatiality of heresy prosecutions in a Springer-Nature journal, contributing to systematic analysis of European inquisition records as structured data.

1 Dec 2023

DISSINET in podcast DATAŘI

David Zbíral and Tomáš Hampejs talk about inquisition records as digital capta with Jan Cibulka in the Czech Radio podcast „DATAŘI“.

27 Nov 2023

CASTEMO data blooms in Neo4j graph databases

Great news! CASTEMO data collected in InkVisitor can now be readily outputted into Neo4j graph databases. Neo4j allows for collected data to be flexibly explored, queried, enriched, and analysed with graph tools.

9 Nov 2023

DISSINET’s article on sentencing in early inquisition trials published in Historical Methods

DISSINET article applying computational methods to sentencing in early inquisition trials published in a top ranking journal Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History.

6 Oct 2023

Heresy Quantified - David Zbíral's professorship lecture

David Zbíral's public lecture as part of the professorship procedure.

19 Sep 2023

Did inquisitors fear charges of sexual misconduct?

Why did inquisitors interrogate women in different spaces than they did men? DISSINET looks into this in the most important history magazine worldwide, History Today.

30 Aug 2023

Religious houses in the Czech lands (interactive map)

DISSINET collaborated on an interactive map of Christian religious houses in the Czech lands.

19 Jul 2023

Mapping Waldensian “synagogues”

DISSINET has published a map of Waldensian gathering places in Piedmont.

23 Jun 2023

A new historian and a computational sociologist have joined the DISSINET team

The DISSINET has welcomed two new team members over recent months following the departure of a historian and a sociologist in autumn 2022.

InkVisitor website launched

The official website of InkVisitor, a state-of-the-art environment for the collection of complex data from texts developed in the Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET) at Masaryk University, is now launched.

22 May 2023

Map of Early Heresy cases in the West, c.1000-c.1150

The interactive map application presents dataset of early cases of heresy in the West, ca. 1000–1150, compiled from original Latin sources. It shows locations, heresy cases linked to those locations, and mentions in the sources, on which the description is based. 

21 Apr 2023

Mapping the Latin of medieval inquisition records: DISSINET’s lexico-semantic network as a language resource

As an important product of DISSINET analytical work, there is a specialised language resource for Latin on the horizon. The aim is to enrich the description of the medieval Latin language and improve the quality of computational analysis performed on Latin sources.

20 Dec 2022

Can artificial intelligence read medieval inquisition records?

ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI, has taken the Internet by storm and has generated quite a fuss also in the DISSINET team. First impressions of ChatGPT’s reaction to medieval Latin texts are astonishing.

12 Dec 2022

Data on witchcraft trials in the Czech lands published online

More on persons, places, charges, punishments, and material substances can be found in the the most comprehensive digital dataset of witchcraft trials in the Czech lands completed by Eva Brhelová, Veronika Praženková, Anna Bílková, Anna and David Zbíral.

2 Dec 2022

Reapproaching inquisition records

David Zbíral & Robert L. J. Shaw have published the most up-to-date summary of the rich debate on the uses of medieval inquisition records. In a last, substantial section, the article explains the core of DISSINET's research agenda.

4 Oct 2022

DISSINET Digital Humanities approach presented in a podcast

David Zbíral was invited to a podcast by the Centre of Early Medieval Studies to talk about digital humanities approch in the research of medieval dissident communities.

Structured data vs. contextual complexity of texts: An unnecessary dilemma?

David Zbíral and Robert Shaw briefly introduce the Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling (CASTEMO), an approach to the human-controlled and data-driven transformation of texts to richly structured data, which was developed within DISSINET modelling of historical textual sources.

1 Jan 2022

The DISSINET team is now complete!

We are delighted to announce that, after two highly competitive hiring processes, DISSINET has gained two new members: Gideon Kotzé (computational linguist) and Larissa de Freitas Lyth (historian)

23 Dec 2021

Modelling German Waldensians’ social networks – thoughts of an associate researcher

BLOG: Reima Välimäki short report on researching Stettin Waldensians social networks and about his experience with the DISSINET data model.

1 Sep 2021

The new DISSINET team is up and running!

On 1 September 2021, the ERC Consolidator Grant-funded project “Networks of Dissent: Computational Modelling of Dissident and Inquisitorial Cultures in Medieval Europe” (DISSINET, 2021-2026) officially gets underway! The team is now constituted. Who’s aboard?

15 Aug 2021

Model the source first! Towards source modelling and source criticism 2.0

The project of computational historiography needs not only to adopt the modelling for representing the target phenomena but also to achieve a complex representation of the textual sources and its interpretive layers. To do the latter, we have developed an approach that we call “source modelling”.

20 Mar 2021

Interview with dr David Zbíral in Magazine M

Dr David Zbíral on religious dissidence, computational interdisciplinary history, and the award of an ERC Consolidator Grant.

1 Mar 2021

Historical Geocoding Assistant in SoftwareX

Historical Geocoding Assistant gains visibility through a publication in SoftwareX.

22 Feb 2021

Welcoming Reima Välimäki as a research associate

We are proud to welcome a cultural historian dr. Reima Välimäki as a DISSINET research associate.

ERC Consolidator Grant awarded to Dr. Zbíral

Dr. Zbíral has been awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant for a five-year research project “Networks of Dissent: Computational Modelling of Dissident and Inquisitorial Cultures in Medieval Europe”.

8 Oct 2020

Dr Zbíral awarded the Rector’s Prize

Dr Zbíral has been awarded the 2020 Masaryk University Rector's Prize for an exceptional research outcome.

5 Oct 2020

ERGM & ALAAM Quick Reference Sheet

We have created a quick reference sheet for the statnet and MPNet
implementations of the ERGMs (Exponential Random Graph Model) and ALAAMs (Auto-Logistic Actor Attribute Model).

19 Aug 2020

Map: Premonstratensian monasteries in France

New interactive map visualizing dataset of Premonstratensian houses in France from the foundation of the order up to the present.

18 Nov 2019

Map: Cathar houses, 1175–1244

New dataset and digital map of the “houses of heretics”.

17 Jun 2019

Map: Lollards, 1414–1522

The DISSINET team has recently been busy creating a digital map which shows the places of origin of Lollards based on their trial records.