Legacy digital and digital legacies: the database of Crusaders to the Holy Land

Hodgson, N ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8490-209X, 2026. Legacy digital and digital legacies: the database of Crusaders to the Holy Land. In: Morreale, LK and Gilsdorf, S, eds., Digital medieval studies: crusaders and computers. Collection development, cultural heritage, and digital humanities . Arc Humanities Press. ISBN 9781802702910 (Forthcoming)

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Abstract

In this chapter, I trace the complicated history of the Database of Crusaders to the Holy Land (DCHL), which began in the late 1980s as a prosopographical relational database. Like many early projects designed by historians, precious little was recorded or preserved in terms of editorial decisions, structural changes, and metadata, and with the passing of its original architect, Jonathan Riley-Smith in 2016, much valuable knowledge has been lost. Drawing upon published work, documents, and interviews with people who worked on DCHL, this article reconstructs how it developed over time to become a core resource for students and researchers of the history of the First and Second Crusades. It employs traditional historical methods as well as Oral History and Critical Digital Humanities to consider broader debates surrounding the preservation, sustainability and upgrading of ‘legacy’ Digital Humanities projects, with a particular focus on prosopography and Medieval Studies more broadly. It also proposes new prospects for reinvigorating the project to incorporate a larger dataset, exploring how other models based on newer software might be adapted to increase the longevity and usefulness of the DCHL, meeting modern user needs. In doing so, it also highlights the importance of documenting and archiving projects along the way, and the prospective challenges we face when ‘rescuing’ an older project. As we move into a new era where Humanities funding is increasingly limited in some sectors, low-cost solutions including minimal computing and static site generators which use templates to simplify the ‘back end’ of a site are much preferred as sustainable solutions.

Item Type:	Chapter in book
Description:	Chapter 3
Creators:	Hodgson, N.
Publisher:	Arc Humanities Press
Date:	1 January 2026
ISBN:	9781802702910
Identifiers:	Number Type 2553207 Other
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	07 Jan 2026 13:04
Last Modified:	07 Jan 2026 13:04
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/54959

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