IMC 2026: Sessions

Over the past three decades the internet has transformed access to medieval sources. Digitisation projects, online catalogues, and large-scale digital text collections have made materials available to scholars and students in ways unimaginable in the early 1990s. Yet many of these resources remain constrained by the formats in which they were first created: scanned PDFs, imperfect OCR, and catalogues designed primarily for human reading rather than computational analysis.

In less than three years since the public emergence of large-scale generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, however, new tools have begun to reshape how these materials can be accessed and analysed. AI-assisted coding, improved OCR, and large language models now allow scholars to reprocess existing digital resources, extract structured data, and enable new forms of search and classification. Resources created in the first wave of web digitisation can thus be reorganised as research datasets.

In keeping with the IMC 2026 theme of Temporalities, this session reflects on a moment of rapid technological change in medieval studies. The papers examine both practical applications—such as restructuring manuscript catalogues—and broader methodological questions about whether the field is entering a new phase in which the principal challenge is no longer access to sources, but how to navigate their rapidly expanding digital abundance.