Mathghamhain – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

Heraldic Registration Basics Redux

At the invitation of the Canton of Northpass, I ran an introductory session today about how participants in the SCA can register historical names and armory.

I used my “Heraldic Registration Basics” document as the basic outline for the class, although I glossed over some sections and went into additional detail in others.

My thanks to the class participants for the questions and comments during the class; the ensuing discussions inspired me to add a few more paragraphs to my notes so I can better cover those topics the next time.

On the Heraldic Submissions for the Ranged Weapons Peerage

The introduction of the proposed name and insignia for the new ranged-weapons peerage has provided a rare glimpse into an uncommon occurrence in the Society; a decade has passed since the last time this happened, and it’s unlikely another will be added any time soon.

As shown on the August 15 Laurel letter of intent, the proposal is for the name “Order of Esperance” and a tinctureless, fieldless badge of “A set of nesting scale weights within and conjoined to a mascle fleury at the upper point.”

Unregistered Badges of the Eastern Baronage

As mentioned in my recent post of baronial banners, House Runnymede is an association of the landed nobles of the East Kingdom, formed in an era when the baronage felt they might need to coordinate their efforts in response to royal overreach.

In years gone by, a badge was proposed for Runnymede, although it was never registered with the College of Arms. The insignia combines symbols of the House’s common greeting — tilting one’s coronet as you pass a fellow member — with its primary activity — gathering for informal conversation over drinks.

House Runnymede

A goblet argent enfiling a coronet bendwise Or.

For the landed baronage of the East.

Armorial Banners for House Runnymede

In the SCA, House Runnymede is an association of the landed baronage of the East Kingdom. Its name was inspired by the circumstances of its creation, at a time (decades ago) when some felt that a counterweight was needed to royal power; in recent years it functions more as a social and support network for the baronage.

Each year, Runnymede holds a dinner at Pennsic, and the vicereines of Østgarðr had offered to host this year’s gathering. Beyond the standard duties of organizing the venue, food, and entertainment, they wished to make the event memorable by providing their guests with personalized gifts, and I volunteered to assist with that effort.

In the months leading up to the dinner, I worked to emblazon the arms of the eighteen Eastern baronies, as well as the Crown Province, for production as fabric banners which would be presented to the guests — and now that the festivities have passed, I thought I would share those images here.

Two Routes to Ancient Names and Arms

When our local canton changed its name a year ago, we piloted the introduction of the “ancient branch name” provisions, as discussed in the October 2023 cover letter. A few months later, the administrative handbook was updated to reflect this change, as well as cover an alternate route to establishing ancient branch names and arms, as discussed in the March 2024 cover letter.

Geographic and Linguistic Indexes of DMNES

I was intrigued by a recent blog post by Anéžka Liška z Kolína, in which she describes a technique for locating names in the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources from a particular region of interest.

However, it seemed to me like there ought to be an easier way to quickly find the relevant sources for such an exploration — a quick way to see all of the bibliographic entries related to a given region and language.

As DMNES doesn’t currently provide such an index, I made a simple mirror of the site and whipped up a quick-and-dirty Perl script to look for citations and build an index page:

A Geographic Bibliography of DMNES

Google Searches for the CoA Website

For more than a decade, the state of the art for searching the LoARs has been “go to Morsulus.org and run a Google search.”

We can improve on that by using Google’s “Programmable Search Engine” tool, which lets you customize some search engine parameters and then embed a widget on your own page. (This system is already in use for the name-articles search on Morsulus.org, but not the LoAR search.)

This isn’t the final answer to searching the LoARs — in the long run we can improve on this with a custom-coded tool that understands the structure of our letters — but it’s something that can be deployed with little effort, and I think it is an advance over what we have today.

Imagining a New Look for OSCAR

As noted a couple of weeks ago, I recently set up a working mirror of the SCA’s Ordinary & Armorial that incorporates the look and feel of the College’s main website, and tonight I wondered whether the same idea could be extended to the College’s commentary tool, OSCAR.

(I have no mandate to redesign OSCAR, and little sense either of the effort involved or whether such a venture would appeal to the system’s primary developer or the community that uses it, so this should be understood to be purely a matter of idle speculation.)

The resulting mockup includes just six pages: the home page, the list of active letters and that of kingdom letters, the tracking grid, a sample search result, and one sample letter (with commentary expunged).

First Round of Updates to the CoA Website

Over the last few days, two updates have been deployed to the heraldry.sca.org website by Reis ap Tuder, the Codex Herald.

Most noticeably, the larger sans-serif typeface and responsive styling for small screens discussed in last month’s post about Enhanced Readability for the CoA Website are now live.

Secondarily, the first round of updates from the Proposed Navigation Changes for the CoA Website have been applied, creating a new “About Us” page that combines the contents previously found under the “Jobs” and “Links” choices in the main navigation menu.

Prototyping a New Look for the O&A

As part of my ongoing efforts to prototype possible changes to the College of Arms website, I’ve applied a related set of stylistic changes to my local mirror of the SCA’s armorial database.

Under the hood, this site is running a fork of the main O&A codebase (along with a custom local configuration file), so the core functionality is the same, but a number of changes have been made to the user interface throughout.

Site-Wide Visual StylE

The most obvious changes are to the overall appearance of the site.