MeSeCA - Medieval Serbian Charters Action - Towards a Digital Edition of the Royal Charters of Medieval Serbia

The aim of the project is the improvement of substantial, technical and software aspects of the digital database of Serbian medieval charters named Diplomatarium Serbicum Digitale (DSD) in cooperation with the Zentrum für Informationsmodellierung (ZIM) of the Graz University. The main objectives are to complete the database material, containing of edited document texts, metadata and images, and to conclude its transformation into a scholarly digital edition according to the current standards of Digital humanities. The DSD project has been established by me and my colleagues from Belgrade in order to fill the void in the research left by the lack of a comprehensive edition of Serbian medieval charters. As its growing digitised material was accessible within the online-database only until 2020, when the respective domain expired after the funding by the EU in frames of the CO:OP project had been concluded, the future of the undertaking is now depending on the possibilities of its digital transformation and continuing of the research work on editing texts and diplomatic analysis. The best opportunity for achieving those goals would be my longer stay in Graz, continuing the fruitful partnership with the director of the ZIM, professor Georg Vogeler, belonging to the European leading experts in Digital diplomatics, and his colleagues. The cooperation with the ZIM would be a necessary step in order to make a digital edition possible and solid performable, especially concerning application of XML standards, publication strategies and long-term archiving. During the stay in Graz I could also firm up my competences in the field of Digital humanities, which are still missing in the Serbian universitary landscape. In that way I would like to give a contribution to the medieval research of my region, but also to present myself as a candidate for a programme in Digital diplomatics, to be introduced at the Philosophical faculty in Belgrade.