Digitally approaching early medieval monastic archives: the cases of Farfa and Fulda

Join us for the first event in our Research and Rescue series, focussed on the life-cycles of digital projects in culture and creativity.

Digitally approaching early medieval monastic archives: the cases of Farfa and Fulda

Monastic Economies in the Carolingian Age (MonECA) is a collaboration between the Universität Tübingen and the University of Liverpool. The project compares the social and economic lives of the monasteries of Farfa, in Lazio, Italy, and Fulda, in Hesse, Germany, in the Early Middle Ages. One of its core outputs will be a digital edition of the charters (legal documents) of both Farfa and Fulda from the eighth through to the late ninth century. In our presentation, we will discuss some of the challenges faced by an incipient digital humanities project. What standards should we use? How can we ensure our digital outputs last after our funding ends? How can we ensure an international collaboration functions well, investigating two distinctly different sets of archival evidence? Our approach – using a modified version of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) standards – tackles these problems, balancing our historical research questions with our aim to produce a reusable edition and research tool for other medievalists.

Speakers

Melissa Kapitan is a postdoctoral researcher at Universität Tübingen. On Monastic Economies, she works on the charters of Fulda Abbey in Hesse, Germany.

Eddie Meehan is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liverpool. On Monastic Economies, he works on the charters of Farfa Abbey in central Italy.

Fabian Schwabe is based in the CoHumLab at Universität Tübingen. On Monastic Economies, he has created the XML-TEI schema and collaborates on technical aspects of the data model.

This will be a hybrid event with speakers joining both in-person and online. Refreshments will be provided for in-person attendees.

All welcome, to attend please register here (opens in new tab).