Digital resources for legal history
The typical sources for legal history, such as court records or laws, are often available in large quantities and with a low average degree of originality, thus representing an obvious body of material for applying Digital Humanities methods. Their often formulaic language also makes them suitable for such analyses.
As such work requires the (mass) digital availability of sources, extensive digitisation campaigns have been taking place in legal history for over half a century, ranging from trial records to dictionaries, from corpora to digital editions. All this is discussed in Andreas Wagner’s contribution on ‘Legal History’ in Clio Guides, part of the main German Digital Humanities website for historians. His article provides an overview of the developments of the use of Digital Humanities in legal history and indicates the key collections, institutional players and resources.