Some lessons from Graz on modelling medieval charters
After two years in Paris, I arrived in Graz at the beginning of July 2024 to complete my 3rd year of PhD as an Erasmus student under the supervision of Georg Vogeler.
My first meeting with Georg Vogeler was in Paris in Mai 2022 during the Icarus convention #28. I was an intern at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, which was organising the conference, and Dominique Stutzmann asked me to collaborate on their joint project: BeCoRe. A few months later, I started a PhD focusing on the Counts of Valentinois beyond the Rhône and I took advantage of this experience to develop an interest in digital diplomatics and its uses in the analysis of medieval documents. Inspired by this work, and in particular by the Charters Encoding Initiative, I developed my own data schema to support the database gathering my sources. All of this convinced me to undertake a long research stay in Graz to learn more about data modelling and the general challenges of digital diplomatics.
My first week there was spent at the “Computational Language Technologies for Medievalists” summer school, during which I discovered new text mining tools adapted to medieval corpora. I was then very kindly welcomed by the whole team at the Department of Digital Humanities, and more specifically by the members of the ERC DiDip project, and invited to take part in their working meetings. This working environment has enabled a great many advancements in my thesis work: I have been able to talk to members of the DiDip project about the technological challenges of diplomatics, discover new methods in data modelling, broaden my cultural and linguistic horizons, etc. I also had the opportunity to present my research in English for the first time, first to the DDH students and then at the International Medieval Conference in Leeds, and to spend some good moments between serious discussions and conviviality. Now on my way back to Paris, I’m continuing my research with new skills, new ideas, an openness to international research and lots of good memories.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Virgile Reignier (July 24, 2025). Some lessons from Graz on modelling medieval charters. DiDip. Retrieved November 7, 2025 from https://didip.hypotheses.org/3678

