Digital and Distant Diplomatics in the PRIN “Il chiostro e il potere”
I was invited by our advisory board member Antonella Ambrosio to discuss the digital activities in the context of the PRIN “Il chiostro e il potere” (PI Francesco Panarelli, https://chiostroepotere.unibas.it/). You can find a beautiful Italian summary of the session in a blogpost by Antonella Ambrosio. I want to share here my response to the contributions of the final conference of the project more extensively. We listened to the following three contributions:
- Antonella Ambrosio: Criticità e potenzialità della digitalizzazione delle fonti documentarie provenienti dagli archivi monastici del”ltalia meridionale (Critical issues and potential of digitising documentary sources from monastic archives in southern Italy)
- Luigi Tufano: Prima del Collegio dell’Annunziata: note tergali e strumenti delle digital humanities per la ricostruzione del diplomatico di un conservatorio medievale (Before the Collegio dell’Annunziata: notes and digital humanities tools for reconstructing the diplomatic history of a medieval conservatory)
- Maria Pia Tiseo: La ricomposizione degli archivi dei monasteri benedettini: dalle collection su Monasterium.net alle sperimentazioni HTR (The recomposition of Benedictine monastery archives: from the collections on Monasterium.net to HTR experiments)
You can find the full program of the event in beautiful Naples, 19./20. February 2026 at https://www.studiumanistici.unina.it/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Programma-Convegno-chiostro-e-potere.pdf. The session was chaired by Attilio Bartoli Langeli, one of the grand old scholars of Italian diplomatics, and, I think, gave insight into several crucial points of digital and distant diplomatics:
The three contributions: Maria Pia offered us three verbs to describe the contributions in this section: reconstruct, describe and interrogate. These three verbs sum up well the possibilities that digital methods can offer us. However, I would like to explore their argument further: digital technology encourages us to think about documents in a different way, one that is unfamiliar to us, in order to reveal things that are less visible. Digital systems are information systems that amplify and transform the systems we are used to.
Accessibility We have heard that Monasterium.net presents more than 735,000 documents online. Has anyone ever read 735,000 documents, parchment by parchment? Is Monasterium.net therefore a diplomatic and historical paradise? Certainly not. We cannot touch the digitised parchments, and it is difficult for us to develop an intuitive idea of such a large amount of material. A critical eye raises other questions: how much of the heritage has already been digitised? And how is it digitised — in descriptive form or through images?
Antonella raised another important point: size is an expression of fragmentation. Four hundred conservation sites spread across more than two hundred cities are an eloquent example of this. We should convert this fragmentation into aggregation. In my research group in Graz, for example, we have selected more than 400 monastic archival fonds in Monasterium, identified by archival title and archival description, in order to study their composition in aggregate form: temporal distribution, composition of the fonds, etc. Digital systems such as Monasterium.net are amplified archival systems. With them, we can study who collected and curated the documents in the monastic archives, thus arriving at a richer archival history and institutional research. With the digital system, Luigi Tufano re-organised the documents as documentary blocks, arriving at a veritable institutional tectonics: incorporated convents, people and entities of power closely linked to these institutions.
Luigi Tufano has thus provided us with a fine example of how the historical organisation of archives can be interpreted: parchments were certainly treated as legal titles and economic instruments, but the organisation of documents can also be read as an expression of power – starting with notes on the back… I personally learned how important power can be in the administration of historical archives when, ten years ago, I spent some time in the archives of southern Italy. I came across, for example, dorsal notes bearing nothing more than ‘privilege of the emperor’ – the social role of the issuer was sufficient for the contemporaries to identify the document and to know what to do with it. Dorsal notes can tell this kind of history. That is why, in the DiDip project, we are developing layout recognition software with the aim of creating lists of regions – such as the notes at the back of the document – that are systematically processed.
The general thinking about digital systems as information systems follows up on Antonella’s proposal, who showed us how the consequences of editing change when we convert them into a digital system.
Which digital methods? The contributions presented mention tools such as GIS, databases and HTR. The summary of the session raised a question: are these methods transpositional or transformative?
They are transpositional. The transition from parchments to data is, at first glance, transpositional: in order to study documents as nodes in a documentary network, to see them as a system, it is necessary to develop common models applicable to a fragmented corpus, applicable in a systematic, normalised and structured way.
But they are also transformative. In fact, digital methods and the representation of documents in digital format create a transmedia representation: encoded and queryable through linguistic symbols, i.e. keywords, but also numerically, as in the case of geographical coordinates. Digital methods are transformative in the conditions of their study and interpretation.
Distant reading — with GIS and other tools — allows us to search for patterns, commonalities, groupings and distributions in the data, including those of a mathematical nature, such as the generation of clusters of similar documents. This is the direction taken, for example, by Niklas Tscherne’s ongoing research in the BeCoRe project, which works on the automatic distinction of papal documents using computer vision systems.
At the symbolic level, methods include transcription and description for coding. First and foremost, they are transpositional — but they are also transformative in creating new ways of clustering and semantic analysis, for example, by projecting text into a semantic embedding similar to large language models (LLMs). However, there is also a sub-symbolic level, where we work with pixels and individual letters. This is a field to be explored – where we should conduct experiments that sometimes fail and sometimes succeed, and where nothing definitive is yet visible. But if we succeed, it will be transformative. So, the transformation is less about the diplomatic object itself and more about the ‘invisible’ records – too large or too small to be perceived – that open up new avenues of research.
Research questions But which avenues? To which questions should we apply these methods? In the context of this conference, the first place is obvious: religious history understood as institutional history. But, of course, the list of other questions to consider is long – I included examples in my recent presentation in Barcelona: – Do the notaries of the papal chancery correspond to the recipients?
- Who uses the clause das ist unser ernstlich meynung and when?
- Show me all the notarial signs used by those who were active in Cologne in the first half of the 15th century!
- Was the text of the charter drafted by the chancery (individually or by reusing a form) or by the applicant/recipient?
- Is there a correlation between the author of the document and the clauses?
- What are the common patterns of document production in a specific region? – Where did the language of papal documents most strongly/earliest influence local charter practice?
- Which legal practice (notaries, common law, Roman law, etc.) has most influenced the language of the documents?
- Is the layout of the parchments a local, personal, regional or supra-regional development? Where and when did it begin?
- Is there a correlation between issuers and notaries?
I am sure that the transformative effect of digital representation and digital methods will result in other, much more interesting questions. However, regardless of the question and the method, we ultimately return to the non-digital method par excellence: the results of digital research continue to be recounted and incorporated into narratives – in a word: history.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Georg Vogeler (February 26, 2026). Digital and Distant Diplomatics in the PRIN “Il chiostro e il potere” DiDip. Retrieved March 8, 2026 from https://didip.hypotheses.org/4649

