Diplomatics is the archival science discipline that studies how documents are created, the forms they take, how they are transmitted, and how they relate to the facts they record; including to the people who made them, so that the document’s nature and authenticity can be established.
This practice was developed in the seventeenth century to test the authenticity of medieval charters, it was recast in the 1990’s by Dr. Luciana Duranti as a method for analysing modern digital records. This sunburst diagram is based on a SKOS RDF vocabulary of diplomatics concepts and terms derived from Dr. Duranti’s “Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science” articles.