Diritto Romano senza confini. Le tecnologie digitali nella romanistica e nella Rivista di Diritto Romano

Abstract This contribution traces the relationship between Roman law scholarship and digital technologies, written in connection with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rivista di Diritto Romano. From the outset, the journal was conceived as a digital and openly accessible platform, anticipating developments that would later become central to academic publishing. The paper reviews key stages in this transformation, from early electronic databases and text corpora to online research environments and computational methods applied to sources of Roman law. It also argues for a clear methodological distinction between tools designed for access and retrieval, those used for linguistic and textual analysis, and more limited forms of computational modelling. The final section considers recent work in computational Roman law studies, including multispectral imaging, digital apographs, distributional semantics, stylometry, and AI-assisted approaches to textual lacunae, with reference to Gai Institutiones. Digital methods, it concludes, strengthen scholarly control and transparency while leaving interpretive judgement with the researcher.