In order to provide an opportunity for the critical discussion of digital methods and resources in legal history, and in order to learn about the vast array of such methods and resources, the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History will be holding a conference on “Digital Methods and Resources in Legal History” on March 19-20, 2020. We invite interested researchers to present collections, databases, gazetteers and similar resources of relevance to legal history, but also to show how these or other resources, and how digital methods in general have been put to use in concrete project contexts. Note that we explicitly invite reports about research questions, projects or approaches that have failed to find or create digital means to work with in a satisfactory manner, too. Some of the questions that could be discussed are the following:
- What insights in legal history have been made possible by the use of digital methods and resources?
- How do you integrate digital methods with hermeneutical and narrative aspects of your work?
- How are popular digital methods of analysis applied in legal history?
- What aspects of texts and objects are particularly relevant for legal history and how can they be modeled and processed in digital approaches?
- How do data-driven methods differ from other approaches in legal history?
- Which limitations did you encounter when trying to use digital tools or methods?
- Which digital resources are presently available, waiting to be exploited by legal history?
- Which resources are lacking?
The call for papers (up to 1,200 words) and posters (up to 500 words) is available here, along with a more elaborate discussion of the conference’s rationale and other bits of information. Submissions should be sent by e-mail to dlh@rg.mpg.de by September 15, 2019.