How did Byzantine studies and Christian archaeology develop? What is "Christian archaeology"? How did the subjects' canon develop and how dynamic is it? How were core but also marginal topics taught at the time of the subject's emergence, and what possibilities are have researchers today?

These and similar questions are the focus of the project on the history of the subject. On the one hand, the development of the thematic orientation and the tendencies of topic identification and development of the entire subject will be examined. For this purpose, publication data of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, i.e. publications of Byzantine research and the corresponding metadata are analyzed with AI-based methods such as modern OCR but also methods of Natural Language Processing such as Topic Modeling and the temporal dynamics of the emergence of topics are determined on the basis of these data.