Extensive excavations carried out by the National Museum of Ireland between 1962 and 1981 revealed a wealth of evidence for the post-917 settlement. The single most important result of these excavations was the information they provided about town layout in the tenth and eleventh centuries. A series of fenced plots or tenements was unearthed and could be traced over a dozen successive building levels. Apart from this, there was also important evidence for house building, and for a succession of waterfronts from between the tenth and thirteenth centuries.

The Vikings settled in Dublin from 841 AD onwards. During their reign Dublin became the most important town in Ireland as well as a hub for the western Viking expansion and trade. It is in fact one of the best known Viking settlements.

At least two runic inscriptions carved into the marble walls of the Hagia Sophia may have been engraved by members of the Varangian Guard.

A half-century later, the Vikings would be recruited to defend Constantinople instead of attacking it. When Byzantine Emperor Basil II faced an internal uprising in 987, Vladimir the Great gave him 6,000 Viking mercenaries known as Varangians to differentiate the native Scandinavians from the Rus who by the middle of the 10th century had assimilated with the native Slavs and lost their distinct identity. Impressed by the ferocity with which the Vikings battled the rebels, the emperor established the elite Varangian Guard to protect Constantinople and serve as his personal bodyguards. With no local ties or family connections that could divide their loyalties and an inability to speak the local language, the Varangians proved far less corruptible than Basil’s Greek guards.

It is not known when the Rus first reached Constantinople, but it was before 839 when Rus representatives arrived at the Frankish court as part of a Byzantine diplomatic mission.

The epic voyages of the Vikings to the British Isles, Iceland, North America and points west tend to obscure the fact that the Scandinavian warriors also ventured far to the east across Europe and parts of Asia. While the Danes and Norwegians sailed west, Swedish fighters and traders traveled in the opposite direction, enticed initially by the high-quality silver coins minted by the Abbasid Caliphate that sprawled across the Middle East.

Throughout the 8th and 9th century, Vikings began traveling south from Scandinavia to raid the monasteries and towns of what is today France. By 911, they were so present, and ferocious, that the French king was forced to cede part of northern France to them. Some Vikings settled there permanently, eventually becoming known as the Normans—Norse men—of Normandy. Later, the same Viking spirit saw them traveling throughout the continent, on expeditions to the United Kingdom and southern Italy.

These hulking skeletons are believed to have been the descendants of Vikings who colonized northern France and, later, southern Italy and Sicily.

A visualization is a decision you make based on what you want your audience to learn. That said, there are a great many wrong visualizations.

they represent a unique way of presenting visualizations that can be extremely compelling and effective. They embody the idea that simple visualizations can be more powerful than complex ones, and that multiple individual visualizations can often be more easily understood than one incredibly dense visualization.

Maps are not necessarily always the most appropriate visualizations for the job, but when they are used well, they can be extremely informative.

While few people can label every U.S. state or European country on a map accurately, we know the shape of the world enough that we can take some liberties with geographic visualizations that we cannot take with others. Cartograms are maps that distort the basic spatial reference system of latitude and longitude in order to represent some statistical value.

These visualizations are good for directly comparing absolute values to one another, when geographic region size is not particularly relevant.

Choropleth maps should be used for ratios and rates rather than absolute values, otherwise larger areas may be disproportionately colored darker due merely to the fact that there is more room for people to live.

As content is added to a map, it may gain a layer or layers of information visualization. One of the most common geographic visualizations is the choropleth, where bounded regions are coloured and shaded to represent some statistical variable

Our decisions on how to encode our data and which data to present deeply influence the understanding readers take away from a visualization.

visualizations still have an important role to play in translating complex data relationships into easily digestible units.

. You may begin your research with a dataset and some preconceptions of what it means and what it implies, but without a well-formed thesis to be argued. The exploratory visualization allows you to notice trends or outliers that you may not have noticed otherwise, and those trends or outliers may be worth explaining or discussing in further detail.

When first obtaining or creating a dataset, visualizations can be a valuable aid in understanding exactly what data are available and how they interconnect. In fact, even before a dataset is complete, visualizations can be used to recognize errors in the data collection process.

You may begin your research with a dataset and some preconceptions of what it means and what it implies, but without a well-formed thesis to be argued. The exploratory visualization allows you to notice trends or outliers that you may not have noticed otherwise, and those trends or outliers may be worth explaining or discussing in further detail.

The use of visualizations to show the distribution of words or topics in a document is an effective way of getting a sense for the location and frequency of your query in a corpus, and it represents only one of the many uses of information visualization.

Visualization is a method of deforming, compressing, or otherwise manipulating data in order to see it in new and enlightening ways.

23. kafliSighvatr Sturluson bjó í Hjarðar-holti nökkura vetr. Síðan keypti hánn Sauðafell, ok fór þangat Nautfellis-vetr, ok bjó þar. Hann görðisk mikill höfðingi ok vinsæll við sína menn. Meðr þeim Kolbeini Tumasyni var in mesta vinátta með tengðum. Kolbeinn réð þá mestu fyrir norðan land, ok hafði öll goðorð fyrir vestan Öxnadals-heiði til mótz við Ávellinga-goðorð; en Þorsteinn Ívarsson gaf Snorra Sturlusyni Ávellinga-goðorð, þat er hann átti. En Mel-menn áttu sínn hluta goðorðz. Fyrir norðan Öxnadalsheiði áttu þeir goðorð, Ögmundr sneis, ok Hallr Kleppjárnsson. Þorvaldr son Guðmundar ins Dýra fékk Sigurði Ormssyni þau goðorð er hann hafði átt. Sigurðr gaf þau goðorð Tuma, syni Sighvatz; ok komzk Sighvatr svá at þeim síðan.

Ultimately, the purpose of this map is to encourage and aid new readings of the sagas. As Franco Moretti writes: “Placing a literary phenomenon in its specific place — mapping it — is not the conclusion of geographical work; it’s the beginning. After which begins in fact the most challenging part of the whole enterprise: one looks at the map, and thinks” (Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900

Exploring at first hand how the events that the ͍slendingasögur describe are mapped onto and around the landscape and commemorated in place-names was a compelling approach to this remarkable body of literature. No less illuminating was witnessing for myself how modern Icelanders continue to engage with their local and national saga heritage.

We, however, do believe that this all needs to be both contextualized in terms of the ethical implications and the field’s historical development, and nuanced with respects to the knowledge claims that can be made.