From Digital to Distant Diplomatics Digital Diplomatics 2022

The Digital Diplomatics 2022 conference took place from the 28th to 30th of September 2023. It was the fourth instance of an international conference series (Munich 2007, Naples 2011, Paris 2013), which originally started as a workshop in Munich in 2004. In the long gap between the last conference and this one, the digitization of research on medieval charters, instruments, and deeds has advanced significantly, although some problems of digital diplomatics remain unsolved.One common thread in many talks of the conference was the importance of well-processed and sustainable data which gains its value from being accessible and useful to not only singular projects but also further research.The application of machine learning methods to corpora of single sheet legal documents is rather modern and results in new and exciting research questions for our discipline. They allow us to climb on the shoulders of the data giants that have emerged in the last 15 years, with new ideas and unwavering enthusiasm.