‘Unlocking Upcycled Medieval Data’ is a collaboration of British and German digital historians to realise the potential of a unique collection of medieval sources that tell the story of Anglo-German trade. Our project will advance knowledge of pre-modern trading networks and economies through the first comprehensive analysis of the detailed ‘particular’ London Customs Accounts (LCA) – probably the single largest surviving serial collection of medieval trade documents in Europe. The LCA are a crucial record of London in Europe and a vital element in the story of the German cities’ relationships with the world. The value of the LCA is in their potential to reveal the practice and impact of late medieval trade through people, relationships, and material objects. The LCA have recently been transcribed and published as 40 PDFs containing more than 10,000 pages. Yet it remains extremely challenging to harness them to answer wideranging or longitudinal questions. Their scale frustrates manual analysis, while their format and complexity presents a barrier to conventional digital tools.
Our methodology of data upcycling will unlock the LCA for comprehensive analysis. Our approach will open the LCA for AI-assisted analysis, bridging the gulf between traditional historical source editing and digital humanities approaches. We will
develop reusable methods to upcycle existing transcripts of semistructured historical sources into open and reusable machinereadable data, while respecting medieval historians’ relationships with their sources. We will also develop data enrichment workflows to cut through the complexity of medieval data to trace material objects through time and space. We will apply the upcycled data to some of the most enduring questions in late medieval social and economic history. We move beyond money to look at networks of people and things transnationally to revise understanding of the consumer
economy in North West Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Contributing to these significant historical debates, and providing access to the sources will be of great significance not only to historians, but to economists, archaeologists, and the cultural heritage sector.
Our methodological innovations will also be of great importance for digital humanists working with other semi-structured data. Delivering the first comprehensive analysis of the detailed LCA will open new perspectives on the prosperity of late medieval Europe, with implications for interpretations of long-term growth and development. Meanwhile, our insights into late medieval material culture will shed light on the often ephemeral objects of everyday life that are underrepresented in other sources and museum collections. We will amplify our work through our partnership with the Europäisches Hansemuseum to tell transnational stories to wider communities through data and collections.