Digital legal history is, for me, less a sub-discipline than a working practice: a way of asking what new questions become tractable when one has the full corpus of a region’s police ordinances available in machine-readable form, rather than the canonical anthologies that have governed the field since the nineteenth century.
The core methodological questions are three. First: how do you classify normative texts across language barriers? Police ordinances in the Holy Roman Empire, the Low Countries, France, and Scandinavia regulated overlapping concerns but used different terminologies; only a controlled multilingual vocabulary — an ontology — allows genuinely comparative work without flattening local idioms. This is the work of RHONDA. Second: how do you metadate normative texts at scale, including handwritten ones? This is the question that connects the Bern Mandatenbücher corpus to the Annif automatic-subject-indexing toolkit, and that HISMET is now addressing for the archive side of the problem. Third: how do you build and sustain the shared infrastructure that makes this kind of research possible across institutions and national research traditions? That is the question behind the Journal for Digital Legal History and behind my involvement with READ-COOP.
I write about these matters in the Journal for Digital Legal History, DSH: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and JDMDH, among others.
Related projects
Entangled Histories
KB Researcher-in-Residence — HTR and segmentation for Low Countries ordinance books.
→RHONDA
Multilingual ontology for early modern police ordinances.
→Law and Order: Low Countries
NWO Rubicon — institutions and legislation in the early modern Low Countries.
→A Game of Thrones?
NWO Veni — normative governance in the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation.
→HISMET
NWO XS — topical metadata for archival sources.
→Journal for Digital Legal History
Open-access journal at the intersection of legal history and digital humanities.
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