Social Network Analysis

Poetry & Society in Byzantium – From the FileMakerPro Database to the Book

My doctoral thesis focused on a randomised sample of 120 unpublished epigrams on artworks – that is, poems potentially inscribed on objects – found in a single medieval manuscript. I wanted to understand how the social status of a donor affected the production of a text on an object and how an elaborate inscription could enhance a patron's social and cultural capital. To manage such complex and voluminous data that these epigrams provided, I designed and created a customised FileMaker Pro Database. The database allowed the development of a quantitive approach to Byzantine artistic and literary production, the direct management of complex prosopographical data and the mapping of affiliations between patrons and the donations' geolocations. The findings proved, for the first time, the mobility of artistic production across Europe and the Holy Land and demonstrated the relationship between commissioning poetry and the political affirmation of the Byzantine influence in the twelfth-century Mediterranean. The thesis was published as a book in 2021.