About the Digital Livonia project

The project of Digital Livonia aims to build a new analytical approach that integrates traditional methods of studying medieval history with research methods and tools in digital humanities in order to build major prosopographic and other databases, prepare new online collections of sources, and produce innovative scholarship on the intellectual, spatial, social and economic history of medieval Livonia (c. 1200-1550). With this general aim in mind, we are building an open web platform, Digital Livonia, intended for scholars and other people interested in medieval Livonia.

The sources concerning medieval Livonia are often difficult to access because they are scattered in various (local and foreign) archives and museums and in numerous publications. Recently, an increasing number of these materials have been digitized. However, there has been no attempt to connect and coordinate these various digital subsets. Also, a significant amount of materials still needs to be made digitally available. Furthermore, the search functions of existing collections are often limited, and the quality of the metadata is uneven.

In response to these challenges, we are building a bilingual (Estonian and English) web-based research platform that helps scholars to study a variety of topics in medieval Livonian history that involve comparative analyses beyond national and institutional limits. We are cooperating with all the major memory institutions in Estonia who possess the relevant digitized source materials about medieval Livonia (especially National Archives of Estonia and Tallinn City Archives). The platform makes available also a digital collection of medieval Livonian source publications. We have carried out a systematic digitization of these publications in cooperation with the Tallinn University Academic Library. The digitized texts are fully searchable and will be linked to the digitized original versions, if available. And finally, the platform will accommodate about ten databases on various aspects of the history of medieval Livonia, prepared in the framework of the Digital Livonia project.

The project is carried out at the School of Humanities of Tallinn University and it is funded in 2021-2025 by Estonian Research Council (grant PRG1276).