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From Marche to Graz: a brief summary

Lamponi, R. (2024). A Net of Notaries, Notaries in Net. Computational Language Technologies for Medievalists Summer School, Graz, Austria. Department of Digital Humanities, University of Graz. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13787932

During my first year of PhD at the University of Macerata, I attended the “Computational Language Technologies for Medievalists” summer school at the Department of Digital Humanities at the University of Graz. It was a great opportunity for me to learn about digital approaches to medieval texts and documents. In this event I met Prof. Georg Vogeler and the DiDip team and I presented my project during the poster session.

My PhD project focuses on the role and the social function of notaries in the Late Middle Ages in Fermo and its countryside (Marche region, central Italy), studying primarily some registers containing notarial deeds. Part of the project involves a digital approach for collecting information from notarial deeds and for testing HTR techniques on this type of documentation.

Continuing with my PhD project and wanting to delve deeper into its digital aspects, I therefore decided to spend a research stay in Graz at the Department of Digital Humanities and under the supervision of Prof. Georg Vogeler. My research period in Graz (September to December 2025) allowed me to work on my project in a stimulating and comfortable environment and I had the opportunity to talk about my research with the members of the ERC DiDip project. I really appreciated the exchange of views during the weekly meetings and in general the opportunity to discuss various aspects and issues related to the digital approach to medieval documents.

View over Graz historic center from Schlossberg with rising sun in the background.

I tried to focus primarily on the part of my project relating to HTR techniques for notarial registers, delving into both the theoretical and practical aspects. This allowed me to make significant progress in understanding how HTR works in all its steps, especially regarding layout analysis, and to find solutions that are as suitable as possible for the documentation I am studying. I was therefore able to continue my work on line polygons, text regions and transcriptions with greater awareness and I paid more attention to documents with complex layouts. Working on this part of my PhD project, I had the opportunity to better understand the notary’s handwriting and its evolution throughout his professional activity.
I am really grateful for this experience in Graz and I will take with me many good memories and new perspectives for my research.

Roberto Lamponi


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
rlamponi (December 13, 2025). From Marche to Graz: a brief summary. DiDip. Retrieved January 21, 2026 from https://didip.hypotheses.org/4425


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