Digital Diplomatics 2011: Tools for the Digital Diplomatist (program)
From the Call for Papers:
Studying medieval documents the scholars never had a fundamental opposition on using modern technology to support their research. Nevertheless no technology since the introduction of photography had such an impact on questions and methods of diplomatics as the computer had: Digital imaging gives us cheap reproductions at high quality, so nowadays large copora of documents are to be found online. Digital imaging allows manipulations to make apparently invisible traces visible. Modern information technology gives us access to huge text corpora in which single words and phrases can be found thus helping to indicate relationsships, to retrieve parallel texts for comparision or plot geographical and temporal distributions.
The conference aims at presenting projects which working to enlarge the digitised charter corpus on the one hand and on the other hand will put a particular focus on research applying information technology on medieval and early modern charters aiming at pure diplomatic questions as well as historic or philologic research.
The organizer of the conference therefore invite proposals dealing with questions like:
- How can we improve the access to digital charter corpora?
- How can the presentation of digital charter corpora help research with them?
- Are there experiences in the application of complex information technologies (like named entity recognition, ontologies, data-mining, text-mining, automatic authorship identification, pattern analysis, optical character recognition, advanced statistics etc.) for diplomatic research?
- Have digital charter copora developed new research interests?
- Are there old research questions to be tackled by the digital technologies and digital charter corpora?
- Which well establish methods can’t be accelerated by digital technologies?
- How far the internet the has changed scholarly communication in diplomatics?
- How you shape digitization projects of charters to meet research needs?
The papers on this program address some of the areas that made me interested in topic maps.
Commercial semantic issues pale beside those of academic textual analysis and research.