As early as the 1970s, diplomatics, i.e. research on mediaeval documents, noticed the benefits of the computer for the indexing and editing of mediaeval charter collections. In the following decades, numerous relevant research projects were initiated that explored and clarified the potential of a connection between digital humanities and the methods of historical auxiliary sciences. They have found expression in the series of conferences on the topic of “Digital Diplomatics” (in particular Munich 2007, Naples 2011 and Paris 2013), in which the digitisation of charters, their publication on the web, and the digital analysis of document corpora in cooperation between archives, diplomatics, historians and computer scientists were discussed.
The ERC Advanced Grant project “From Digital to Distant Diplomatics” takes up this tradition and wants to take stock of the different projects and approaches to the topic of “digital diplomatics” with the conference “Digital Diplomatics 2022”.
The international conference in Graz is intended to offer all scholars interested in this complex of topics the opportunity for discussion and exchange, from questions about digital support in the formal and content analysis of documents, to the planning and implementation of digitisation projects in archives and libraries, to the future direction of this new research field.