Digital tools will dig into history

YORK, England, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- British historians, archivists and experts in computer science say they are collaborating on developing new ways of exploring digital historical records.

Researchers from the Universities of York and Brighton are working with colleagues from Canada, the United States and the Netherlands to develop tools to allow people to work effectively and efficiently with the vast amounts of historic material currently being digitized, a York release said Wednesday.

The project, dubbed ChartEx for charter excavator, is meant to create new ways of exploring European medieval charters that deal with the buying, selling or leasing of property.

Charters recorded legal transactions of property, describing houses, workshops, fields and meadows and the people who lived there.

Long before records such as censuses or birth registers existed, such charters were -- and still are - the main resource for researching people, tracing changes in communities over time and finding ancestors, the researchers said.

"An abundance of medieval charters from the 12th to 16th centuries have survived and provide a rich source of information when studying the lives of people in the past," Sarah Rees Jones of York's history department said.

"The ChartEx tools will enable users to really dig into these records, to recover their rich descriptions of places and people, and to go far beyond current digital catalogues which restrict searches to a few key facts about each document."