ABSTRACT
This chapter is divided into two parts, the first on current theoretical and methodological issues, including a brief history of research, and the second on a selection of ongoing projects within the field of medieval studies (focusing on Old Norse) which make use of digital technology. Declaring digital data sets as a new kind of end product of research is disputable, not least because both the translation of cultural objects into digital code and the emergence of born-digital data have so far hardly been subject to thorough debate within the humanities. In recent years, debates on knowledge reasoning and knowledge representation from the Middle Ages up to the present have intensified, with the relation of theory and method in interdisciplinary research being a major point of discussion. Given increasing software solutions to graphically rendering data networks, the digital generation and visualization of semantic networks should prove valuable in explicating the kind of knowledge often overlooked due to an alleged self-evidence.
