Medieval Russian Social and Economic "Connectedness" in the 12th and 13th Centuries: Vernacular Textual Dissemination, Connection Arrays and Short-Pat

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My proposed thesis will examine the social and economic "connectedness", as attested by birchbark documents, ofselect cities in 12th-13th century Rus'. Here, social connectedness is defined by kith and kin relationships, and economicconnectedness as trade-related activities (and what may be termed "co-worker" relationships) such as the fur-trade. Mythesis aims to answer several questions. 1) Which cities were connected by social/economic networks in birchbarkcommunication (including by its means of dissemination: river and road routes, and messengers). 2) How strong werethese networks across distances (which may be charted using sociomatrices, incidence matrices, graph theory, anddigital humanities technologies). My thesis aims to visualise these networks using digital tools, such as Gephi, and tomake this research available to others in the field. My thesis will primarily use birchbark documents, but other documents(such as the First Novgorodian Chronicle) will be consulted. The social and economic networks present in thesebirchbark documents will be analysed using social network analysis methods - namely graph theory, matrices(sociomatrices and incidence matrices), and digital tools for visualising and manipulating textual data.