FLAG team members Wim Peters and William Hepburn are co-authors of a new journal article entitled ‘Digital Hermeneutics, Medieval Texts, and Urban History: A Case Study from Aberdeen, Scotland’.

This open access article examines the use of natural language processing (NLP) methods to enrich, rather than replace, interpretative workflows in historical research. It showcases some of the key digital humanities methods applied in the FLAG project. Combining existing digital tools and custom computational processing, it advocates an approach to deep text interpretation by historical scholars.

The authors describe what the identify as a ‘digital hermeneutical method’ and show that this work provides relevant results for the example of the late medieval concept of ‘good account’ which they investigate in the Aberdeen Registers Online: 1398-1511. They argue that a combination of tailored quantitative and qualitative text analysis methods can be integrated into a flexible research workflow, which empowers the interpretative work of humanities researchers. The model of inquiry described in this case study from the FLAG project can be applied to other textual data sets.

The article may be found at:

Wim Peters and William Hepburn (2025) ‘Digital Hermeneutics, Medieval Texts, and Urban History: A Case Study from Aberdeen, Scotland’, Digital Humanities Quarterly 19:3 https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/19/3/000817/000817.html