Digital Diplomatics 2011: Tools for the Digital Diplomatist
From the website:
Scholars of diplomatics 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 relationships, to retrieve parallel texts for comparison 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.
An excellent opportunity for topic maps to illustrate how all the fruits of modern and ancient commentary can be brought to bear, using a text (or at least the idea of a text) as the focal or binding point for information.
Biblical scholarship, for example, becomes less sweat of the brow in terms of travel/access and more a question of seeking answers to interesting questions.
Proposals due: May 15, 2011
Conference: Naples, 29th September – 1st October 2011