Jan Bigalke, University of Cologne - Cologne Center for eHumanities

Jonathan Blumtritt, University of Cologne - Cologne Center for eHumanities

Sviatoslav Drach, University of Cologne - Cologne Center for eHumanities

Claes Neuefeind, University of Cologne - Cologne Center for eHumanities

Marcel Schaeben, University of Cologne - Cologne Center for eHumanities

In our contribution, we present the results of the DigiByzSeal project, co-funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Agence nationale de la Recherche (ANR) in Cologne and Paris. This project addresses a critical gap in Byzantine historical research: the limited availability of documentary evidence compared to the Classical and Western Medieval worlds. Byzantine seals, numbering around 100,000 specimens, provide a unique but underutilized source for understanding the administrative, social, and personal networks of the Byzantine Empire. However, these artifacts are dispersed across collections worldwide, and the absence of shared standards for their study has hindered accessibility and systematic analysis. The DigiByzSeal project directly addresses these challenges by providing digital tools and methodologies to improve access to and usability of this historical source. A key achievement is the creation of a centralized sigillographic portal, which facilitates cross-corpus searches through the implementation of SigiDoc, a TEI-based standard specifically designed for encoding sigillographic data. Seal editions integrated into the EFES platform—a web-based environment for editing and publishing structured epigraphic and sigillographic data—now support advanced filtering and complex query capabilities. In the course of the project, approx. 4000 seals from four major collections in Cologne and Paris were encoded in SigiDoc, with several hundreds captured with Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), establishing best practices for managing diverse collections by balancing the autonomy and identity of individual repositories with the need for computational consistency in data modeling.