Historical seminar of Scientific Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of  Science and Arts has in collaboration with  Postgradual School ZRC SAZU organised a lecture by prof. dr. Georg Vogeler with the title

Digital Diplomatics: a new range of interpretation of historical documents.

Lecture was held on Tuesday, May 16th 2017 at the premises of ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana.

A video of the lecture, which is in English,  is available at the link.

As an old auxiliary historical discipline (introduced by Mabillon in the 17th century), diplomatics has a clearly defined scope and subject: the study of official historical documents (charters) as reliable sources, since they contain distinct information on the place and date of creation. Therefore, these documents are relevant not only for historical research, but also for linguistics and other disciplines that deal with historical facts. But the documents do not always tell the truth. Diplomacy developed its basic methodology precisely to identify fakes. Since the birth of diplomacy, her research interests have developed in particular in the direction of cultural history (literacy, symbolic communication, etc.). With the development of computer technologies, the modern branch has also developed: “digital diplomatics”. The lecture will show what this research area covers and how it affects the research interests of diplomatics. This example can serve as an example, in which we better understand what happens if digital tools are applied to research objects of humanists.

Georg Vogeler works as a professor of auxiliary historical sciences and their use in digital humanities at universities in Graz and Munich. He was one of the founding members of the research institute Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik for the development of digital methods in the field of scientific texts, especially historical documents. Since 2006, he has been the technical director of the consortium monasterium.net, which includes over 500,000 documents from the Middle and Early Modern Centuries. Since 2007, monasterium.net has been involved in the ICARUS consortium, Vogeler carries out the tasks of a technical director for the entire consortium. He led or co-organized a series of symposia and summer schools on the subject of digital humanities, in particular a series of international symposia Digital Diplomatics.