Urban Sources, Data, and Digital Diplomatics: a CIRICE 2026 Session in Dialogue with DiDip

The session Urban Sources and Digital Methods: Interdisciplinary Pathways between Southern Italy and Europe in the Middle Ages, organised and coordinated by Antonella Ambrosio within CIRICE 2026 – Cities in Transition, grew out of a question that intersects one of the central concerns of DiDip: how can we move from the critical reading of medieval documentary sources to their modelling as data without losing the complexity of the texts, contexts, and practices that produced them?
This question becomes particularly delicate when the focus is on the city. A source becomes valuable for urban history when it allows us to trace how a city takes shape: through the practices that traverse it, the institutions that govern it, the memories that record it, and the often very concrete ties that connect it to its territory.
The CIRICE session provided an opportunity to situate this question within the broader contexts of urban studies and the Digital Humanities, placing digital diplomatics in dialogue with urban history, territorial history, landscape archaeology, architectural history, visual culture, and the analysis of large documentary corpora.

The methodological issue running through the session concerned the transformation of sources into data that can be interrogated historically. Between the reading of a source and its digital representation lie several decisive operations: selection, description, normalization, georeferencing, and the choice of visualization formats.
The papers addressed different sources, scales, and contexts: a medieval Sienese cadastral source used as the basis for a new reading of urban space; the notarial documentation of the city of Naples between the ninth and twelfth centuries, read through the relationship between city and territory; a Byzantine narrative source on the memory and representation of Constantinople; the case of a fortified settlement in the Nola area, in Campania, where castle, village, and territory define one another; and, finally, the digital documentary corpus of Monasterium.net, interrogated from the perspective of a possible mapping of urban diplomatics.

A particular role in this trajectory was played by the concluding paper, presented by Giuseppe Consolo and Tamas Kovacs, together with Johannes Laroche, Niklas Tscherne, and Georg Vogeler, entitled Towards a Mapping of Urban Diplomatics: Opportunities and Challenges from Monasterium.net Data. The paper brought the discussion to the scale of large digital corpora, asking a question directly connected to DiDip’s interests: how can an urban dimension be recognized within a large, heterogeneous, and stratified collection of medieval documents?
The perspective presented by Consolo and Kovacs showed the need to distinguish between geographical information, documentary density, and urban significance. A place, a recurrence, or a concentration of legal documents becomes historically meaningful only when it can be related to institutions, documentary practices, procedures, functions, spaces, and contexts of production and preservation.
Precisely because this paper translated many of the questions raised in the session into an operational workflow, we present it here through a short note focusing on the workflow proposed around Monasterium.net and FLAME.

A note on Monasterium.net, FLAME, and urban diplomatics

The reflection on urban diplomatics was developed from the MOM-AT corpus on Monasterium.net, which consists of 5,701 documents. The platform provided a particularly productive working environment, as it makes it possible to query metadata and texts at scale and to observe relationships between places of issue, documentary formulas, and institutional contexts. The availability of such a large corpus makes it possible to grasp phenomena that are difficult to perceive at the level of the individual document: documentary concentrations, formulaic recurrences, spatial distributions, and metadata anomalies.

A first level of analysis concerns the metadata relating to the place of issue. The place name attested in the documents can be extracted, normalized, linked to modern coordinates, and compared with external reference datasets such as GeoNames or the Österreichischer Städteatlas. This process turns dispersed information into a queryable and visualizable dataset that can reveal clusters, gaps, recurrences, and areas of particularly high documentary density. Georeferencing thus becomes an orienting tool: it allows the corpus to be observed as a whole and new questions to be formulated about the relationship between medieval documentation and urban space.

Geographical representation, however, gains its full value when connected to the historical and diplomatic analysis of the texts. A document issued in Vienna, in Graz, or near an urban center opens up an interpretative lead; yet whether the document can be understood as urban depends on the function that the place assumes within the act. The city may appear as the place of the datatio, as a logistical reference, as a space of preservation, or as an effective institutional context. It is precisely this movement from map to document that makes the concept of urban diplomatics productive: not a simple distribution of points in space, but the study of documentary forms through which institutions, offices, procedures, and urban actors become visible in the sources.
FLAME, developed within DiDip by Tamas Kovacs (https://github.com/kreeedit) for the analysis of formulaic similarity among medieval documents, is used in this same perspective. The clusters produced by the tool organize the corpus according to textual and formulaic proximity, making visible groups of formally related documents, isolated cases, convergences, and possible discontinuities. Textual similarity thus becomes a guide to comparison: it makes it possible to identify groups of charters to be read together and to observe whether specific documentary forms, formulas, or textual structures recur in relation to particular contexts of production.

Diplomatic analysis connects these signals to the question of urbanity. To test the relationship between spatial data, formulaic similarity, and historical interpretation, a set of 50 documents was created as a methodological basis for testing the reading criteria. Through this controlled set, it was possible to distinguish between indicators and confounders: on the one hand, the presence of councils, city judges, civic offices, urban communities, municipal procedures, or public spaces involved in the documentary action; on the other, cases in which an urban place name appears in a document dominated by a seigneurial, ecclesiastical, rural, or patrimonial framework. In this way, urbanity is observed not as a simple geographical location, but as a documentary and institutional function that can be recognized in the text.

The method makes it possible to articulate different levels of interpretation. Alongside clearly urban documents, documents with an urban context emerge, as do ambiguous cases and cases in which a reference to the city does not produce an actual urban dimension of the act. This gradual approach is one of the most productive aspects of the workflow because it enables capturing the data’s complexity without reducing it to a binary classification. False positives, false negatives, silent cases, and misalignments among the map, metadata, and text serve as useful elements for better understanding the corpus and for progressively refining the criteria for analysis.
From this perspective, the scalability of the method lies in its ability to provide a more orderly and verifiable entry point to a very large corpus. Maps, external reference datasets, and clusters help guide the analysis, select priority cases, identify documentary groups, and formulate working hypotheses based on explicit signals. This contribution to urban diplomatics lies in the possibility of using a digital scale to recognize new documentary configurations and to make the passage from data to interpretation more transparent. One of the points that emerged most clearly is that digital methods do not replace the critical reading of sources: they enhance it, because they allow us to work with larger sets of material and to formulate new questions; but they also expose it to a risk, because every visualized datum tends to appear more stable and conclusive than the sources allow.

The session thus engaged with several issues central to DiDip and to distant diplomatics: the transition from the micro-analysis of the individual document to large-scale comparison, the critical control of data through diplomatic analysis, and the use of maps, networks, and models as instruments of interpretation rather than as final results. The urban emerged as a historical problem to be recognized in the sources and in the relationships they make visible. The contribution of digital diplomatics lies precisely in this: developing criteria for reading documents not only as points in space, but as documentary practices, institutional relationships, patrimonial arrangements, and forms of connection between city and territory.

The conference proceedings are available as a pre-print, allowing exploration of the individual papers in the session in greater detail at the following link: [CIRICE 2026 Pre-print].

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