Manifesto for a Contemporary Diplomatics: From Institutional Documents to Organic Information

Abstract

The author probes the relationship between the traditional categories of diplomatics and the characteristics of modern records. He offers a more abstract view of the notion of what constitutes a document, and probes the importance of archival documents as a source of memory and truth. Diplomatics then, the author agrees, becomes a method to understand and recover sources of memory and, at the same time, reduce the uncertainty that the abundance of these same sources engenders. He offers new perspectives on the traditional diplomatics categories of form, genesis, tradition, edition, and selection.