Information Technologies for Medieval Studies: Some Recent Experiences in Italy

Abstract

The article highlights the relations between Italian medieval studies and digital humanities, starting from researches conducted on Vatican documents and other ecclesiastical sources since the 1980s; then it goes on to discuss some more recent projects, based on various types of sources. A multi-faceted debate emerges, in which the experiences of historians and editors of medieval sources are intertwined with those ones gained in the world of archives and libraries, to face the incessant transformation of Information Technology, from the first “Read-Only” Web to the Web 2.0, from the Semantic Web to the recent challenges posed to historians by research data and Linked Open Data technologies.

Keywords

• Middle Ages
• Italy
• Ecclesiastical sources
• Digital humanities
• Semantic web
• Linked Open Data