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Verona: where the past met with the humanists of the future

Verona, in June this year, was not only a destination for tourists interested in Shakespearean romance and ancient Roman monuments but also for researchers from the Digital Humanities. This year, the University of Verona hosted the annual conference of the Italian Association for Digital Humanities and Digital Culture (AIUCD), which provided insights into how digital humanities (DH), combining cutting-edge technologies and classical source criticism, is revolutionising cultural heritage research.
This is the challenge that our colleagues at DiDIP have set themselves. Franziska Decker and Giuseppe Consolo presented their study of late medieval notarial deeds. Drawing on the vast online archive of Monasterium.net, they built a corpus of 14th-15th century documents, mainly from southern Italy, Austria and Germany, with the aim of identifying notarial practices, document types, and social networks inherent in charters using advanced computer methods such as text mining, information retrieval, and network analysis. Their work not only enriches the science of digital diplomatics but also supports the emergence of cultural heritage platforms as modern research tools.
Similarly, but methodologically even more in-depth research was carried out by Tamás Kovács, who investigated the medieval Central European reception of Roman law through the language of charters. As medieval legal formulas are extremely diverse, traditional computer methods fail. To address this problem, DiDip’s colleagues developed FLAME and an innovative procedure based on LNO-grams, which can identify and analyse passages that show significant differences but carry the same legal concept.
But the Verona conference painted an even broader picture of the current state of the digital humanities. In addition to the diplomatic research in Graz, exciting projects such as “IlluminAI”, an interactive navigation system for Renaissance miniature manuscripts, and an experiment to investigate the applicability of large language models (LLM) in the translation of the Babylonian Talmud were presented. In addition, the research analysing the cultural biases inherent in artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on the marginalisation of African art, represents an important critical voice. The projects presented have shown that digital humanities is not only a new tool for understanding the past, but also a critical reflection on the technologies of the present, in a city like Verona, which is a perfect bridge between history and innovation.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Tamás Kovács (July 9, 2025). Verona: where the past met with the humanists of the future. DiDip. Retrieved November 7, 2025 from https://didip.hypotheses.org/3515


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