Annotating Formulaic Language in 12th Century Papal Charters: Observations on Definitions and Challenges

The system of papal delegated jurisdiction played an important role in enforcing papal judicial primacy from the end of the twelfth century onwards. We aim to investigate the evolution of specific judicial formulaic expressions accompanying this newly emerging type of jurisdiction and therefore address the challenge of annotating relevant expressions in our charter corpus in order to compile a ground truth for the training and evaluation of digital methods for the detection of formulas. By using double blind annotation, we iteratively refine our annotation procedure as well as our working definition of the phenomenon, thereby also discussing problems pertinent to other types of formulaic language such as variable elements and modifications as components of the expressions. Finally, we also present some quantitative observations about the formulaic expressions in the charters annotated so far.