State of the Field: Digital Legal History. A (Western) methodological overview.

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the methodological advancements in Digital Legal History (DLH), focusing on pivotal processes such as digitisation, datafication, and the evolution of ontologies. It demonstrates how digitising legal sources preserves extensive archives while datafication transforms them into structured, machine-readable formats, facilitating more sophisticated analysis. The article provides a detailed discussion of the role of ontologies in linking legal data across platforms. It outlines how the enhancement of cross-disciplinary research through interoperability is being facilitated. Furthermore, the integration of large language models (LLMs) is investigated, illustrating their capacity for automating processes such as text analysis and the summarisation of legal texts. However, challenges associated with potential bias and accuracy are also addressed. The article provides insight into how these digital methodologies are reshaping the study of legal history, facilitating new research possibilities, interdisciplinary collaborations and broader access to legal materials.