Another digital artifact lives. The York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator was my first serious accomplishment in digital humanities. After I learned all the medieval drama content from a class with Andrea Johnston at the University of Toronto, I made the computer program as part of a humanities computing course with Willard McCarthy in 1994, and published a poster paper and an updated version over the next few years. This simulation didn’t discover anything new, but it did visualize information other people had figured out with pencil-and-paper calculations, and it provides some answers to some “but what if…” objections. The program itself hasn’t changed since 1997, but security changes to modern web browsers make it inconvenient for casual visitors to run the program. I took a screencast of the program in operation. I really should add narration so the program makes more sense, but for now I’m just posting the video.

Source: York Corpus Christi Play Simulator (PSim 2.1; D.G. Jerz)