A year-long project to investigate the use of digital technologies in prosopographical research resulted in the creation of intermediary objects (called ‘factoids’) within the database to model the multiple relationships possible among elite medieval landholders. These factoids facilitated a modular approach to database development, whereas a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) allowed flexible and speedy data entry. GIS provided a mapping function via Web Map Services.

One of the early drivers of historical GIS was the development of national historical GISs. These systems usually hold all of a country's census and related statistics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As such they have represent an extremely valuable resource, but at the same time they were and remain extremely expensive and time consuming to build. Was the investment worthwhile? This paper takes one of these systems, the Great Britain Historical GIS, and explores how it was built, what methodologies were developed to exploit the data that it contains, and provides an example to demonstrate how it made possible a unique analysis of railroads in Wales before the First World War.

This papers starts with some mysterious contribution by Michel Foucault (1967) about heterotopias as special epistemological sites. With a recent case-study – an immersive virtual reality art project dealing with some ancient abbey reconstruction and managed by a French engineering school – we analyse the successive attempts to satisfy the system users by extending Foucault's heterotopology, which appears to be useful and creative for the Virtual Reality research communities.

In this paper we relate linguistic, geographic and social distances to each other in order to get a better understanding of the impact the Dutch-German state border has had on the linguistic characteristics of a sub-area of the Kleverlandish dialect area. This area used to be a perfect dialect continuum. We test three models for explaining today's pattern of linguistic variation in the area. In each model another variable is used as the determinant of linguistic variation: geographic distance (continuum model), the state border (gap model) and social distance (social model). For the social model we use perceptual data for friends, relatives and shopping locations. Testing the three models reveals that nowadays the dialect variation in the research area is closely related to the existence of the state border and to the social structure of the area. The geographic spatial configuration hardly plays a role anymore.

In this essay I would like to stimulate crosstalk, or interdisciplinary investigation among the humanities, and more specifically to show how humanities computing might prompt this by providing common means of analysis. The main practical point we emphasize is that techniques from humanities computing may be applied to linguistic variation but also to other cultural variation which does not involve language. The two areas of analysis—linguistic and nonlinguistic culture—have to be compared if we wish to understand whether culture is transmitted along similar paths and in similar ways. Then the essay continues to the more polemical point that interdisciplinary work is worthwhile in itself and therefore that humanities computing is more worthwhile for further enabling the interdisciplinary work. The somewhat negative term ‘crosstalk’ is used deliberately here to acknowledge that efforts at interdisciplinary investigation are inevitably going to involve difficulties in communication, even misunderstandings. The potential benefits of interdisciplinary work outweigh these problems; in fact the unavoidable misunderstandings may even prove stimulating. Cultural variation and cultural diffusion underscore the main argument