Author of William the Conqueror's 'Medieval Big Data' Project Revealed
12 comments
·July 7, 2025teddyh
KineticLensman
Well it is basically a press release announcing a new book, but TFA does contain some things I didn't know. It specifically identifies the suggested author, namely Gerard, William’s final chancellor, later Bishop of Hereford and Archbishop of York.
jfengel
That was new, though I wish they'd listed any of the reasons to think that.
They hint that it's stylographic, the details of which would not make terribly interesting reading. Still, I wish they could have picked out something, rather than irrelevant stuff about what a massive undertaking it was.
If they've got nothing more than "We ran it through the algorithm and this is what it popped out", then I'm not really all that interested in their conclusion. Stylometry provides hints but if you can't back it up with some sort of historiographic argument then it doesn't really inform history much.
KineticLensman
Looking at the actual synopsis of the 1000-page (!) book [0], and the table of contents [1], rather than the press release, suggests that this was a fairly serious undertaking.
[0] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-domesday-9780...
[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-domesday-9780...
parpfish
Didn’t know map-reduce went back that far
panzagl
Given the effects of the harrowing of the North, the process was more like reduce-map...
jxjnskkzxxhx
Lol map reduce.
The 2010s called, they want their abstractions back.
jonathan_11
[flagged]
ChrisMarshallNY
> the product of raw, not artificial intelligence
Them's fightin' woids, around here!
Contentless article.