History faculty members Ralph Mathisen and Kalani Craig along with graduate students Cade Meinel and Erdinç Ofli traveled to the 2026 International Medieval Studies Conference at Western Michigan University where they demonstrated the department’s expanding program in digital history.
Professor Kalani Craig presented at the Digital Medieval Studies Institute, a series of workshops on digital scholarly methods for medievalists, that precedes the conference. Her workshop, “Building a Virtual Medieval Pilgrimage,” taught participants how to create web-based experiences that allow users to go on a medieval pilgrimage without ever having to leave their town. Craig also presented her work at the conference in her paper “The Virtual Medieval Pilgrimage for Digital Public Engagement with Medieval Studies.”
Meinel and Ofli also participated in the Digital Medieval Studies Institute. Meinel attended a workshop on 3D modeling of medieval codices and inscriptions, which allows scholars to gain a greater sense of an object’s physicality when looking at a digital facsimile. Ofli attended a workshop on handwritten text recognition software, which scholars use to transcribe historic documents.
Professor Ralph Mathisen presented two papers at the conference on social network analysis, a tool that allows historians to build visualizations of the relationships between people, places, and events. He shared how he teaches the tool in graduate seminars in “From Zero to Sixty: Teaching SNA to Graduate Students with Zero Digital Background” and how he uses it in his own research in “Social Network Analysis and Late Antiquity: Payoffs and Pitfalls.”
Both graduate students presented at the conference as well. Ofli presented the paper “Verses of Alterity: Representation of Muslims in Carolingian Poetry” and Meinel presented “The Legal Lives of Fifth-Century Mediterranean Sailors” which utilized social network analysis methodologies he learned from a seminar taught by Mathisen.
“All of us provide on-the-ground evidence of the department’s expanding program in the application of digital methodologies, a program that will ensure that the department remains on the cutting edge of the teaching and application of new methodologies for the study of history,” said Mathisen.