Automatic Annotation of Legal References (Allegationes) in the Liber Extra’s Ordinary Gloss

The study of normative corpora of the past is a key activity in the fields of Religious Studies and Legal History. The development of intelligent software tools that support this activity is of paramount importance to support the digital transformation of the community. We present an interdisciplinary activity that leads to an accurate automatic annotation of legal references in the Liber Extra’s Ordinary Gloss. An index of legal references has been derived from the annotations enabling the creation of novel navigation and data analysis tools. The contribution of this work is twofold: the actual index is already by itself a valuable resource for the discipline, and we detail the process that leads to its production, showing that an effective result can be delivered by a small team with limited resources. Both the index and the code are made publicly available.