Digital Resource and Database of palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic: DIGIPAL

DigiPal, the Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic, is a new resource being developed at the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London. Funded by the European Research Council (ERC) as part of the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) under grant agreement n° 263751, the project aims to bring new methods in Digital Humanities to the study of medieval handwriting in its diplomatic and manuscript context by combining digital catalogues, descriptions of handwriting, and images of documents and their constituent letter-forms.

The project aims to bring digital technology to bear on scholarly discussion in new and innovative ways. It combines digital photographs of medieval handwriting with detailed descriptions and characterisations of the writing, as well as the text in which it is found, and the content and structure of the manuscript or document as a whole. It incorporates different ways of exploring and manipulating the information, thereby allowing scholars to apply new developments in palaeographical method which have been discussed in theory but which have proven difficult or impossible to implement in practice.