Legal History Meets Digital Humanities

For several years at the Department Historical Regimes of Normativities of our Institute, various research groups and personal research projects have been actively integrating the methods offered by the Digital Humanities into their theoretical research perspectives and activities. The permanent seminar Legal History Meets Digital Humanities intends to provide a space for discussion and in-depth analysis of the numerous themes, techniques and challenges Digital Humanities offers to historical research, in particular to legal history.

At present, several areas of the digital humanities are essential for our projects, such as digital editions, big-data analysis, ontologies and taxonomies, authority databases, visualisation and mapping, graph and sql databases, metadata, digital narratives in social media, and others. We start from these areas for the seminar's organization, which reflects our experiences, challenges, and projects. Despite the wide variety of topics and historical periods covered, our projects share some common challenges, particularly the need to deal with historical data and sources and to reflect on how methods based on digital humanities impact current debates in the history of law. 

Seminar organisation

The seminar meets about six times a year, but other activities, such as workshops, project presentations, practical sessions, etc., are possible. All activities will be announced on this page and disseminated via the Institute's and projects' social accounts. All sessions take place in a hybrid format: in person at our Institute in Frankfurt and online. The language of the seminar is English.

The seminar is open to all interested persons, and no special preparation is necessary to participate, neither in digital humanities nor in legal history. If you have any questions, please contact us at the following e-mail address: dhseminar@lhlt.mpg.de