Scholars of diplomatics never had a fundamental opposition on using modern technology to support their research. Nevertheless no technology since the introduction of photography had such an impact on questions and methods of diplomatics as the computer had: Digital imaging gives us cheap reproductions at high quality, so nowadays large corpora of documents are to be found online. Digital imaging allows manipulations to make apparently invisible traces visible. Modern information technology gives us access to huge text corpora in which single words and phrases can be found thus helping to indicate relationships, to retrieve parallel texts for comparison or plot geographical and temporal distributions.