undate

Code

Koeser, Rebecca Sutton, Cole Crawford, Julia Damerow, Malte Vogl, and Robert Casties. “Undate Python Library”. Zenodo, July 2025.

Documentation

Undate documentation, Read the Docs.

Publications and Presentations

Koeser, Rebecca Sutton, Julia Damerow, Robert Casties, and Cole Crawford. “Undate: Humanistic Dates for Computation.” Software paper published in Computational Humanities Research, August 5, 2025.

Koeser, Rebecca Sutton. “Undate: Computing with Uncertain and Partially-Unknown Dates.” Computational notebook presented at USRSE’25. October 6, 2025.

Rebecca Sutton Koeser. "Undate in Action." Presentation at Digital Humanities Tech Symposium, DH2025. July 14, 2025.

Rebecca Sutton Koeser. Join me for a DHTech hackathon? It’s an un-date! DHTech, February 9, 2023.

undate is an ambitious in-progress effort to develop a pragmatic Python package for the computation and analysis of temporal information in humanistic and cultural data, with a particular emphasis on uncertain, incomplete or imprecise dates and with support for multiple calendaring systems and date formats. Development on this project originally began at a DHTech hackathon in fall of 2022. Work has continued since then under the leadership of Rebecca Sutton Koeser, with advice and other contributions from DHTech collaborators (including Julia Damerow, Robert Casties, and Cole Crawford) as well as ideas and input from others working with similar problems.

The project expands on work for partially known dates first implemented in the Shakespeare and Company Project, mixed precision dates in multiple calendar dates in Princeton Geniza Project, with reference to a similar implementation in the Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative.