We invite you to the online lecture by Dr. Sarah Lang (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) on 09.09.2026 from 10:00 to 11:30, organised as a part of the seminar series ‘Legal History Meets Digital Humanities’ at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory.

Digital humanities (DH) has long presented itself as a field committed to openness, collaboration, and innovation. Yet, alongside its many achievements, it also exhibits a number of persistent „dark sides“, ranging from infrastructural inequalities and invisible forms of labour to exclusionary data practices and the reproduction of historical and contemporary biases through digital methods. This chapter argues that one of the most pressing challenges currently facing the field is the persistence of data gaps, understood not merely as missing information but as the result of social, historical, and technical processes that systematically privilege some forms of knowledge while marginalising others. Building on work in critical digital humanities, critical archival studies, critical data studies, critical code studies, and feminist scholarship (including feminist AI ethics), the chapter examines how these traditions have conceptualised and addressed such absences, and considers how their insights can be mobilised more systematically within DH research and practice. It further situates these discussions within the recent shift towards data-centric approaches in artificial intelligence (DCAI), where the quality, documentation, and representativeness of datasets have become central ethical and technical concerns. By bringing these conversations into dialogue, the chapter argues that DH can benefit from engaging more directly with emerging debates on datasets while simultaneously contributing its own long-standing expertise in historical sources, documentation, and critical interpretation.

Please register here: https://plan.events.mpg.de/event/802

The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (MPI LHLT) in Frankfurt is looking for a Researcher in Digital Humanities (m/f/d) to join the department „Historical Regimes of Normativity“, starting 1 October 2026 or as soon as possible thereafter. You will work within the research project Normative knowledge in the Praxis of the Congregation of the Council (PI: Prof. Dr. Benedetta Albani). The position is full-time (currently 39 h/week, divisible), fixed-term for 3 years, paid up to TVöD Bund E13.

What you’ll do:
– Build knowledge graphs from historical data (data modeling / ontology design; querying and analysis with SPARQL)
– Develop scholarly web interfaces (interactive web apps with R / Shiny, innovative publication formats) that link the knowledge graph with transcriptions, images and maps
– Together with the research group and colleagues from research, library and IT, define requirements for digital tools, evaluate and adapt existing solutions, and specify and build new ones where none exist
– Contribute to DH methods and questions, and present your work at conferences and seminars

What we’re looking for:
– A university degree (Master, M.A. or Diplom) in a relevant discipline, with demonstrated experience in Digital / Computational Humanities
– Strong collaboration and organizational skills, and an independent, goal-oriented way of working
– Very good written and spoken English (essential)

More on the project: https://www.lhlt.mpg.de/2732195/rg-albani-Normative-knowledge-in-the-praxis-of-the-Congregation-of-the-Council?c=1796887, or contact Prof. Dr. Benedetta Albani (albani@lhlt.mpg.de)

Applications go through our online portal only (cover letter, detailed CV, certificates, references). The Max Planck Society welcomes applications of every background and explicitly encourages women and severely disabled persons to apply.

More info about application process: https://jobs.lhlt.mpg.de/jobposting/62607be389686327a0c14d8e4125d7a03e2dd8330 

Application deadline: 7 July 2026

We invite you to the online lecture by Prof. Dr. Michael Schonhardt (TU Darmstadt) on 22.05.2026 from 10:00 to 11:30, organised as a part of the seminar series ‘Legal History Meets Digital Humanities’ at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory.

The presentation will focus on the AI-driven datafication of historical sources, ranging from medieval manuscripts to early modern correspondence, into structured and semantic data. It will explain the Digital Editing Toolkit, a modular AI-based editorial workflow, and discuss the potential of vector embeddings and entity linking for new heuristic approaches to digitised source corpora. Finally, it will evaluate how these methods reshape the role of the editor in the age of large-scale datafication

Registration and more information here: https://plan.events.mpg.de/event/762

We invite you to the lecture, organised as part of the seminar series ‘Legal History Meets Digital Humanities’ at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and held online on 10 April 2026 from 10:00 to 11:30.

History writing, archiving and museum practices are at a critical crossroads in confronting their colonial inheritances, particularly in the realm of language. Key knowledge objects such as terminology and metadata, once considered neutral and objective, are now recognised as carriers of hidden coloniality, prompting the development of decolonization guidelines, glossaries and archival advice across the heritage sector. This presentation held by Juliette Huygen, Manjusha Kuruppa, Phạm Thùy Dung from the Huygens Institute, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences interrogates how viable these frameworks are in practice, drawing on two concrete case studies: the Words Matter Project (National Museum of World Cultures), which set a precedent for addressing discriminatory and colonial language in heritage contexts, and the Globalise Project (Huygens Institute, Amsterdam), which is building a thesaurus to define and contextualise terminology in the Dutch East India Company archives. Through these examples, the presentation reveals that transplanting guidelines across disciplinary contexts raises new challenges, and that decolonization remains a complex matter of praxis rather than a problem solved by theory alone.

Please find more information and the registration here.

We invite you to the lecture, organised as part of the seminar series ‘Legal History Meets Digital Humanities’ at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and held in a hybrid format on 10 December 2024 from 13:00 to 17:00.

The presentation held by Bärbel Kröger and Dr. Jörg Wettlaufer from Göttingen Academy of Science and Humanities in Lower Saxony introduces the use of the Wikidata platform, which serves as a central knowledge database in the field of Linked Open Data. The underlying Semantic Web standard will also be briefly explained to provide an understanding of the platform’s functionality and possibilities. In the second part of the lecture, the FactGrid platform will be presented. While it uses the same technical infrastructure as Wikidata, it focuses on the knowledge domain of historical research. Using practical examples from ecclesiastical history, the potential of both platforms, Wikidata and FactGrid, will be explored. The lecture aims to spark a discussion on how legal historical research might also benefit from open and interconnected datasets.

Registration and more details: https://plan.events.mpg.de/event/381/

We invite you to the lecture, organised as part of the seminar series ‘Legal History Meets Digital Humanities’ at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and held in a hybrid format on 3 December 2024 from 14:00 to 16:00.

This presentation held by Prof’in. Dr. Silke Schwandt (Bielefeld University) explores the influence of the digital condition of our society on the development of historical methods in recent years. Methods and practices in history are being transferred into the digital realm and transformed by it. The talk will use several examples from medieval legal history to explore these developments and ask for the institutional challenges and changes that come with the digital condition.

Registration and more details can be found here.

We invite you to the lecture, organised as part of the seminar series ‘Legal History Meets Digital Humanities’ at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and held in a hybrid format on 14 November 2024 from 15:00 to 17:00.

This presentation held by Kilian Lüders (Humboldt University of Berlin) explores how digital humanities and natural language processing methods can be used to assess legal arguments, focusing on a case study of the proportionality test in the German Federal Constitutional Court decisions conducted by the LLCon research group. The project involved manually annotating court decisions and conducting descriptive analysis, while also applying machine learning to automate the recognition of proportionality tests in case law.

Registration and more details can be found here.

We invite you to the lecture, organised as part of the seminar series ‘Legal History Meets Digital Humanities’ at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and held in a hybrid format on 22 October 2024 from 15:00 to 17:00.

In this session we will discuss the topic of scholarly digital editions. Our guest speaker Dr. Bernd Posselt (MGH) will present the experiences of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica project in the digital editing of mediaeval text sources. The talk will address the question of how digital approaches have transformed the field of editing at the MGH.

More information on the event and registration here.

Im Rahmen der Seminarreihe ‚Legal History Meets Digital Humanities‘ am Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie findet der Vortrag ‘Modelling Social and Legal Facts in the Context of the Semantic Data for Humanities and Social Sciences Ontology Ecosystem’ im hybriden Format am 16.05.2024 von 15:00 bis 17:00 statt.

In dieser Sitzung diskutieren wir das Thema der möglichen Anwendungen von Wissensgraphen und Linked Open Data (LOD) in der Forschung der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. Unser Referent Dr. habil. Francesco Beretta (CNRS/ University of Lyon) wird über das Potenzial dieser semantischen Technologien für die gemeinsame Nutzung großer Mengen wissenschaftlicher Daten und die Förderung interdisziplinärer Innovation sprechen.

Weitere Informationen zur Veranstaltung und zur Anmeldung finden Sie hier. Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch.

Im Rahmen der Seminarreihe ‚Legal History Meets Digital Humanities‘ am Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie findet der Vortrag im hybriden Format am 12.12.2023 von 15:00 bis 17:00 statt.

In dieser Sitzung diskutieren wir das Thema der digitalen Nachhaltigkeit. Unser Gastreferent Dr. sc. Moritz Mähr (Universität Basel, Universität Bern) wird die Erfahrungen des Projekts Stadt.Geschichte.Basel bei der Anwendung von Nachhaltigkeitsprinzipien auf die Forschungspraxis eines digitalen Geschichtsprojekts vorstellen. Der Vortrag beleuchtet Strategien der Langzeitarchivierung und -verfügbarkeit sowie die damit verbundenen Herausforderungen.

Weitere Informationen zur Veranstaltung und zur Anmeldung finden Sie hier. 

Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch.