Digital Diplomatics 2013: What is Diplomatics in the Digital Environment? | #DigDipl13

Vom 14. bis zum 16. November 2013 findet in Paris die Konferenz “Digital Diplomatics 2013: What is Diplomatics in the Digital Environment?” statt.

What is Diplomatics in the Digital Environment?

Diplomatics has changed fundamentally in the last few decades due to dramatic developments in information technology. While consolidating itself as an autonomous science with its own centuries-old theory, methodology, analytical processes and tools, focused on research on medieval and early modern legal documents, it has also grown into an interdisciplinary field, expanding its area of inquiry to all kinds of textual traditions, documentary forms and creation processes through the use of sophisticated digital tools. “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us”– said Marshal McLuhan. This is especially true with regard to diplomatics. The easy reproduction and publication of charters makes large fonds accessible to historical research and gives the opportunity to reconstruct dispersed fonds. Text analysis tools allow researchers to dig deeply into the data in the documents, extracting information on the distribution of phrases or legal concepts, and creating resources for statistical and network analysis of content. The possibility of developing data models beyond the material restrictions of a printed book inspires rethinking the traditional ways of editing charters. The access to huge image collections fosters historical research on the semiotics of documents as visual signs. At the same time, the comparison between documents on traditional media and those born digital has shown that classic diplomatic knowledge can be used to address issues related to documents created, managed and preserved in the digital environment. 

Many of the advantages of conducting any kind of documentary research in the digital environment were clear to diplomatists when they began creating online portals of archival material, doing digital editions of medieval documents, analysing linguistically charter corpora or applying to them visual analysis or visualization technologies. Additional opportunities they identified were the ability to make automatic or semiautomatic annotation to the content of documents, and the application of diplomatics concepts for the identification of digital records and the assessment and protection of their authenticity in a variety of information systems. However, a scholarly reflection on how these new directions taken by diplomatics affect its nature as a field of study concerned with a systematic critical analysis of documents has just begun.

Following the two conferences on Digital Diplomatics that took place in 2007 in Munich and 2011 in Naples, this conference has the goal to further the scholarly reflection on the way in which diplomatics has developed as a result of both the opportunities offered by digital tools to study historical documents and the challenges presented by born digital documents and by the need to understand their structure and of the complex digital environments in which they reside.

Website: http://www.cei.lmu.de/digdipl13/

Programm und Abstracts finden Sie hier: http://www.cei.lmu.de/digdipl13/program-2

Hashtag ist: #DigDipl13

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