Re: Major new online resource: "Medieval Lands"

In message of 17 Jun, WJhonson@xxxxxxx wrote:

Quoting the home page : "In this project, the families of rulers and
nobility of more than 140 different geographical and political
entities in medieval Europe and western Asia are being
reconstructed from scratch. The process involves extracting and
analysing detailed information from primary sources, including
contemporary chronicles, cartularies, necrologies and testaments.
The results are presented as narrative outline genealogies.
Information on each individual is shown in "mini-biography" form,
with extracts from source material quoted in the original language.
Marriages and other connections between families are hyperlinked to
enable easy navigation between the different documents. The period
covered is the thousand years between 500 and 1500, although more
emphasis has been placed on presenting source material for the
first six hundred years of this timeframe. "

Okay choosing one of the families, that I happen to be interested in
the "Earls River" here
_http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/ENGLISH%20NOBILITY%20MEDIEVAL2.htm#_Toc127590
555_
(http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/ENGLISH%20NOBILITY%20MEDIEVAL2.htm#_Toc127590555)

Just counting what appears under Chapter 6, section A, subsection 1
there are, at a minimum, one *hundred* statements of *fact, not
*one* of which has a citation. Not one of which has a quotation
*"in the original language" nor for that matter from "chronicles,
*cartularies, necrologies and testaments". It's not that there
*aren't enough citations, its that they're aren't any. Zero.
*Zilch. Nada.

Essentially, this entire section, is lifted, intact from secondary
and sometimes conflicting sources, without a single one of those
being cited.

It's really a worse than useless presentation, it's practically, in
fact if not in intent, plagarism. How exactly was this family
created ? It certainly was not "reconstructed from scratch".

Stirnet does a much better job at it. At least they cite....
something... to back up their statements.

I would completely agree with your analysis: if there are no quotes,
then no research has been done. Once you have realised that applies to
a section, then I personally would ignore that section. We were told
quite clearly that no more work would be done on the first edition and
all the work was being kept for the second edition.

The interesting question is why the second edition is in preparation?
Obviously something was found to be profoundly unsatisfactory with the
first edition. We were not told what this was, we were only told that
the first edition would have no more work done on it.

Personally I would guess that the narrative, long file format apparent
within the first edition is not conducive to handling emergent research.
I suspect that, long term, the whole thing needs to be restructured more
on database lines to make it easy to develop and maintain.

--
Tim Powys-Lybbe                                          tim@xxxxxxxxx
             For a miscellany of bygones: http://powys.org
.

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