Both congresses have a worldwide reputation and are widely recognised platforms for discussing current developments and showcasing new developments as well as recent research approaches in their respective disciplines. Realizing the increasing impact of contributions from digital humanities in Leeds at this year's conference we felt the importance to foster more intense scientific exchange between the Digital Humanities and Mediaevalists.
Thus, the idea was born to introduce a virtual round table discussion between the IMC Leeds and the DHC in Lausanne as a forum that could stimulate an interdisciplinary discussion at two places via live-streaming complemented by additional web-based participatory elements.
Topic During the last decades Digital Humanities have developed out of their niche as an auxiliary scientific research field to an autonomous and well-founded discipline. The reasons for this development are as manifold as the diverging views on what this new discipline is covering, only about ten years after the alias Digital Humanities was coined.
The advance of information technology and the growing impact of the digital paradigm in everyday live has long reached science and humanities. The vast majority of research in the Humanities is transforming information into digital representations and the web and other applications of the internet are used for the constitutive process of exchanging arguments and collating knowledge. At the same time, perception and acceptance of DH grows in the established Humanities disciplines not only because the passover to the world of the digital demands proper handling of the data but also because Digital Humanities succeed in proving its claim to contribute to generating new insights in a number of humanities-related fields.
However, there is no question that this process continues to gain momentum and that it is therefore necessary that both fields not just escort this change but rather actively shape its future path. Therefore, we seek to deepen the already existing dialogue between Mediaeval Studies and Digital Humanities in an innovative event by initiating a well arranged Round Table Discussion on the impact and perspectives of studying the spatial aspects of Mediaeval written sources.
