Papers by Tomáš Hampejs
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2026
Data capture from texts is both at the heart of digital humanities research and a key point of te... more Data capture from texts is both at the heart of digital humanities research and a key point of tension with established interpretive approaches within the humanities at large. The targeted extraction of information often seems at odds with more fluid and contextually interwoven ways of reading, not least the source-critical approach that historians have long emphasized. By comprehensively capturing not only text content, but also its deep contextual embedding, the close modelling of source texts as a series of syntactic-semantic data statements can help bridge this gap. This paper demonstrates the application of such an approach-Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling (CASTEMO)-to the earliest surviving record of a medieval heresy trial (that of Bernard-Oth of Niort and his family), and its advantages for the inclusion of source criticism within formal data analysis. The data capture process itself is shown to provide a facilitating form of close reading: systematically reconstructing every clause of the text as a syntactic-semantic data statement reveals otherwise hard-tosee patterns in textual discourse and its context (i.e. the responses of the witnesses and the way those witnesses are characterized in the text). Subsequent data analysis of the relationships between these features serves to unravel the text's conditions of production and even tell the human story behind the record.
This article presents a proposal for data collection from textual resources in history and the so... more This article presents a proposal for data collection from textual resources in history and the social sciences. The data model and data collection practice we propose is based on detailed, yet flexible semantic encoding of the original natural-language syntactic structure and wording, literally translating texts line by line into structured data while preserving all of their vagaries, complexities, conflicting testimonies and the like. Our use case is the study of medieval Christian dissent and inquisition. We propose a thorough way of modelling the sources in order to make them accessible to any thinkable kind of quantitative and computational analysis. We frame our approach as "serial and scalable reading". Representing a new variety of "serial history", it allows us to understand and model texts as never before, and helps bridge the gap between quantitative and qualitative research in non-trivial ways.
Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 2023
Despite significant research on the techniques of repression employed by medieval inquisitors aga... more Despite significant research on the techniques of repression employed by medieval inquisitors against religious dissidents, the case-level influences on the penances they meted out are understood only vaguely: the extent to which sentencing "systems" existed is unknown. To overcome this, we apply formal methods-an exploratory analysis supported by crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, and statistical modeling founded on multiple linear regression-to the large and historically significant register of Peter Seila (1241-2), captured as structured data via a statement-based approach entitled "Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling" (CASTEMO). The results show that Peter systematically weighted different types of crimes and dissident interactions when sentencing; they do not suggest, however, that he was influenced by accomplicity or kinship among the sentenced.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2022
Imaginative pretend play is often thought of as the domain of young children, yet adults regularl... more Imaginative pretend play is often thought of as the domain of young children, yet adults regularly engage in elaborated, fantastical, social-mediated pretend play. We describe imaginative play in adults via the term "pretensive shared reality;" Shared Pretensive Reality describes the ability of a group of individuals to employ a range of higher-order cognitive functions to explicitly and implicitly share representations of a bounded fictional reality in predictable and coherent ways, such that this constructed reality may be explored and invented/embellished with shared intentionality in an ad hoc manner. Pretensive Shared Reality facilitates multiple individual and social outcomes, including generating personal and group-level enjoyment or mirth, the creation or maintenance of social groups, or the safe exploration of individual self-concepts (such as alternative expression of a player's sexual or gender identity). Importantly, Pretensive Shared Reality (both within the specific context of table-top role-playing games, and other instances) are primarily cooperative and co-creative. We draw on multiple examples, and focus on Table-Top Role-Playing games (TTRPG)-and specifically, the most popular and enduring table-top role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)-as a primary example of such play. Our conception of "pretensive shared reality" links the widespread existence and forms of adult imaginative play to childhood pretense, places it within a developmental and evolutionary context, and argues that pretensive shared realities which underpin many forms of imaginative culture-are an important topic of study unto themselves, and may be utilized to provide methodological insight into a variety of psychological domains.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2022
Imaginative pretend play is often thought of as the domain of young children, yet adults regularl... more Imaginative pretend play is often thought of as the domain of young children, yet adults regularly engage in elaborated, fantastical, social-mediated pretend play. We describe imaginative play in adults via the term "pretensive shared reality;" Shared Pretensive Reality describes the ability of a group of individuals to employ a range of higher-order cognitive functions to explicitly and implicitly share representations of a bounded fictional reality in predictable and coherent ways, such that this constructed reality may be explored and invented/embellished with shared intentionality in an ad hoc manner. Pretensive Shared Reality facilitates multiple individual and social outcomes, including generating personal and group-level enjoyment or mirth, the creation or maintenance of social groups, or the safe exploration of individual self-concepts (such as alternative expression of a player's sexual or gender identity). Importantly, Pretensive Shared Reality (both within the specific context of table-top role-playing games, and other instances) are primarily cooperative and co-creative. We draw on multiple examples, and focus on Table-Top Role Playing games (TTRPG)-and specifically, the most popular and enduring table-top role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)-as a primary example of such play. Our conception of "pretensive shared reality" links the widespread existence and forms of adult imaginative play to childhood pretense, places it within a developmental and evolutionary context, and argues that pretensive shared realities which underpin many forms of imaginative culture-are an important topic of study unto themselves, and may be utilized to provide methodological insight into a variety of psychological domains.
The binding of José Arcadio to the fence: a cognitive
ethnography of situational normativity of m... more The binding of José Arcadio to the fence: a cognitive
ethnography of situational normativity of moral
controversy in the LARP game Cien Años
The paper is an ethnographical probe into
the chosen exotic environment of normativity in the
fictive world enacted and embodied in a LARP game
(role-playing simulation) and a theoretical essay about
the artificial inter-subjectivity in role-playing simula-
tion in general. Based on field research from participant
observation and semi-structured interviews, the study
analyses chosen parts of the recent Czech LARP game
Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
inspired by the book by García Márquez. The aim is
to explore some aspects of the general problem of the
situational normativity of moral behavior using the ex-
ample of the game’s participant behavior. The focus is
on situational micro-social relations between the act-
ing individuals and the environment. The research is
inspired by cognitive approaches to culture, like cog-
nitive ethnography, ecological psychology and enactive
cognitive – situational normativity is understood as a
property of a concrete instance of the embodied and
enacted social environment. The core of the study is
an analysis of a chosen moral controversy from the
game in terms of its participants as well as the situ-
ational construction. The analytical axis is the conflict
or synergy of personal normative attitudes of partici-
pants (“real people”) with the fictional normative order
of the shared world (“roles”). Through an analysis of the
sources of LARP behavior, the study explores the situ-
ational normative attitudes of participants and shows
the interplay of factors on three levels of the situation
(the reality of persons, players, and roles).
The focus of our empirical study was to determine whether a short laboratory-based
intervention m... more The focus of our empirical study was to determine whether a short laboratory-based
intervention manipulating the self-nature relation through a new construct of environmental problem
salience is capable of causing a situational change in implicit and explicit attitudes towards nature. We
were interested in how the self would connect itself to the state of nature portrayed as a threatening problem
for which the self is possibly responsible. The participants were divided into two groups based on their
environmental profiles and exposed to a video clip which implied a global environmental problem. The
study treatment was designed to make the environmental problem salient. We have observed a clear effect
of the field of study, yet the sample size (N=77) was not sufficient for the treatment effect to be statistically
significant. Our study brings mainly preliminary result and further and more robust research is needed. We
observed a slight change in attitudes. The attitudes had divergent directions according to the environmental
profile of the recipient. The results suggest that the participants with a low environmental profile more
deeply perceived the problem as someone else’s problem and dissociated themselves from the nature
framed by the treatment, while the participants with a high environmental profile accepted the problem
and associated themselves with the nature framed by the treatment. Our findings are in agreement with the
critique of the apocalyptical discursive pattern, which considers planned change of environmental policy
with apocalyptical discursive pattern to be ineffective.
BUCHTÍK, Martin; HAMPEJS, Tomáš. 2013. „Role-playing jako živný roztok sociálna: experimentální m... more BUCHTÍK, Martin; HAMPEJS, Tomáš. 2013. „Role-playing jako živný roztok sociálna: experimentální metoda?“. [Role-playing as an agar of sociality: an experimental method?] Teorie vědy/Theory of science. Vol. 35, no. 4. Pp. Pp. 525-549. ISSN 1210-0250
Article introduces active role-playing as a research experimental method in the social sciences. It frames role-playing to the simulating research methods, opens its epistemological properites
and methodological conceptions in social psyschology. Main argument constructs the defense of epistemological properties of active role-playing as an experimental method in the social sciences
in general. Th e inspiring source is one the side Latour’s sociology of associations, which problematizes the very subject of social sciences, the sociality itself and on the other side the naturalizing approaches connecting social sciences and cognitive science. In this context main argument for meaningfulness of simulated social reality lies in the usage of the same cognitive mechanisms in the real and simulated social interaction. In the article perspective both sources are united by their accent on perceiving social reality as fundamentaly inter-psychological phenomenon between the traditional conpcetions micro and macro level. Th rough analogy of Petri dish article conpcetualizes shift of the original method of situational social psychology toward utililization of designed diegetic liminal situations as laboratories of the social.
The study summarizes the advances made in the study of the transmission of religious ideas within... more The study summarizes the advances made in the study of the transmission of religious ideas within the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) over the last twenty years. This research subject represents an established theme from the beginnings of the CSR to the present day. The progressing research shifts from stressing the isolated cognitive aspects of religious ideas as distinctive class of mental representations within Sperber’s epidemiological and Boyer’s minimally counterintuitiveness projects to the acknowledgement of the roles of body, social context and culture in explaining the successful transmission of religious ideas. The social and cultural context became an instrumental part of the way in which the beliefs are analytically metarepresented and these became influential explanatory factors in the scientific understanding of transmission processes in general. However, this does not mean any radical turn away from the cognitive towards the cultural, but rather it emphasizes the need for more complex but still testable models of religious ideas and their dissemination. This reflects a global trend in the CSR with a highlighted role for experimental methods, which proved to be very fruitful in the past. First of all, they helped the CSR to become more precise in formulating theories and models of religious ideas and opened the possibility of progressive explanatory research. Secondly, they brought the empirical psychological study of religion back into the scientific study of religion. On the other hand, the anthropological nature of the scientific study of religion helped to improve the laboratory experimental paradigm by making it more sensitive to cultural differences.
A short larp game description and annotation in Nordic larp yearbook. Pp. 128-137.
This article straddles the border between theoretical essay and review study. It points to the me... more This article straddles the border between theoretical essay and review study. It points to the methodological paradigm of experimental social psychology as a promising space for research on religious belief between the universal claims of the cognitive science of religion, with its emphasis on the evolved cognitive capacities of human behaviour, and traditional historiographic and anthropologic methods with their stress on socio-cultural context. It tries to answer some questions for meaningful reduction and experimentalization of religious belief and reflects on the possibility of measuring such belief beyond the use of questionnaires with their limit on introspection and problem of social desirability bias. It introduces experimental space as a place where new layers of contextual properties are paradoxically revealed, thanks to the reduction and decontextualization of the studied phenomena. Religiosity and religious belief therefore show to a greater extent their dependency on concrete practices and performances. The general aim of the article is to show how an experimentally based conception of the affective part of religious belief, as an implicit attitude, contributes to the de-essentialization of religious belief.
Design: Measuring the "epidemiological immunity" of cultural system as traces of individual autom... more Design: Measuring the "epidemiological immunity" of cultural system as traces of individual automatic implicit relational affinity towards SC and J with self identification implicit association test (Lane et all, 2007) Participants: In three weeks the IAT web study was finished by 99 Czech or Slovak participants (M=49, F=50, age: 34.3% 15-25, 46,5% 26-35, 16,2% 36-45 let, 3% over 45) who reacted on an advertisement on social networks. Materials: self identification IAT towards SC a J Francis scale of attitudes towards Christianity
Conference Presentations by Tomáš Hampejs
The role played by women in medieval dissident movements has been intensively discussed for decad... more The role played by women in medieval dissident movements has been intensively discussed for decades and various powerful examples, mainly from inquisitorial records, have been cited to illuminate this issue. However, the focus on individual cases necessarily leaves the larger questions unresolved. We lack entirely the big picture of women’s actual involvement and have no idea whether it was any different from that of men. Quantitative studies remain extremely scarce, and they rely on counting numbers of women (and men) or instances of preaching by women (and men). Social network analysis seems to be an extremely relevant approach capable of revealing the social microstructure of medieval dissident Christianity’s networks and shedding new light on this issue. The global question in this paper is whether there is any significant difference between the roles played by men and women as approximated by various network measures. The data is three large sets of inquisitorial records (1378, 827, and 1466 nodes) from Languedoc in 1270s-1320s when this area was an important laboratory of the early inquisition. The paper explores the possibilities and limits of social network analysis of data from inquisitorial records, automatically extracted from indices of personal names, and evaluates the validity of this method.
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Papers by Tomáš Hampejs
ethnography of situational normativity of moral
controversy in the LARP game Cien Años
The paper is an ethnographical probe into
the chosen exotic environment of normativity in the
fictive world enacted and embodied in a LARP game
(role-playing simulation) and a theoretical essay about
the artificial inter-subjectivity in role-playing simula-
tion in general. Based on field research from participant
observation and semi-structured interviews, the study
analyses chosen parts of the recent Czech LARP game
Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
inspired by the book by García Márquez. The aim is
to explore some aspects of the general problem of the
situational normativity of moral behavior using the ex-
ample of the game’s participant behavior. The focus is
on situational micro-social relations between the act-
ing individuals and the environment. The research is
inspired by cognitive approaches to culture, like cog-
nitive ethnography, ecological psychology and enactive
cognitive – situational normativity is understood as a
property of a concrete instance of the embodied and
enacted social environment. The core of the study is
an analysis of a chosen moral controversy from the
game in terms of its participants as well as the situ-
ational construction. The analytical axis is the conflict
or synergy of personal normative attitudes of partici-
pants (“real people”) with the fictional normative order
of the shared world (“roles”). Through an analysis of the
sources of LARP behavior, the study explores the situ-
ational normative attitudes of participants and shows
the interplay of factors on three levels of the situation
(the reality of persons, players, and roles).
intervention manipulating the self-nature relation through a new construct of environmental problem
salience is capable of causing a situational change in implicit and explicit attitudes towards nature. We
were interested in how the self would connect itself to the state of nature portrayed as a threatening problem
for which the self is possibly responsible. The participants were divided into two groups based on their
environmental profiles and exposed to a video clip which implied a global environmental problem. The
study treatment was designed to make the environmental problem salient. We have observed a clear effect
of the field of study, yet the sample size (N=77) was not sufficient for the treatment effect to be statistically
significant. Our study brings mainly preliminary result and further and more robust research is needed. We
observed a slight change in attitudes. The attitudes had divergent directions according to the environmental
profile of the recipient. The results suggest that the participants with a low environmental profile more
deeply perceived the problem as someone else’s problem and dissociated themselves from the nature
framed by the treatment, while the participants with a high environmental profile accepted the problem
and associated themselves with the nature framed by the treatment. Our findings are in agreement with the
critique of the apocalyptical discursive pattern, which considers planned change of environmental policy
with apocalyptical discursive pattern to be ineffective.
Article introduces active role-playing as a research experimental method in the social sciences. It frames role-playing to the simulating research methods, opens its epistemological properites
and methodological conceptions in social psyschology. Main argument constructs the defense of epistemological properties of active role-playing as an experimental method in the social sciences
in general. Th e inspiring source is one the side Latour’s sociology of associations, which problematizes the very subject of social sciences, the sociality itself and on the other side the naturalizing approaches connecting social sciences and cognitive science. In this context main argument for meaningfulness of simulated social reality lies in the usage of the same cognitive mechanisms in the real and simulated social interaction. In the article perspective both sources are united by their accent on perceiving social reality as fundamentaly inter-psychological phenomenon between the traditional conpcetions micro and macro level. Th rough analogy of Petri dish article conpcetualizes shift of the original method of situational social psychology toward utililization of designed diegetic liminal situations as laboratories of the social.
Conference Presentations by Tomáš Hampejs