9,884 research outputs found

    Exploring manuscripts: sharing ancient wisdoms across the semantic web

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    Recent work in digital humanities has seen researchers in-creasingly producing online editions of texts and manuscripts, particularly in adoption of the TEI XML format for online publishing. The benefits of semantic web techniques are un-derexplored in such research, however, with a lack of sharing and communication of research information. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project applies linked data prac-tices to enhance and expand on what is possible with these digital text editions. Focussing on Greek and Arabic col-lections of ancient wise sayings, which are often related to each other, we use RDF to annotate and extract seman-tic information from the TEI documents as RDF triples. This allows researchers to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings. The SAWS project advocates a semantic-web-based methodology, en-hancing rather than replacing current workflow processes, for digital humanities researchers to share their findings and collectively benefit from each other’s work

    Introduction

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    The seminars entitled Palaeography Between East & West, which I convened at Sapienza University, aimed at offering a forum, a place of sharing knowledge and debate, to scholars who deal with manuscript materials in various languages and alphabets. Entitled “Paleografia, paleografie. Esperienze a confronto” (2 March 2011), “Tra lingue e scritture. Itinerari grafici nel Mediterraneo e oltre” (2 April 2012), “La Paleografia tra Oriente e Occidente” (5 April 2013), “La Paleografia tra Oriente e Occidente – Palaeography between East and West” (19 May 2014), these seminars (Figs. 1-4) gathered contributions about very different areas. The essays gathered in this volume contribute to the idea of a world pale- ography. I very much hope that the field of palaeography, and the related do- mains of book-history and manuscript-culture, will receive more attention in future, and scientific recognition as an autonomous domain of research with- in Islamic studies and as a proper field of research within palaeographical studies

    Agendas for Digital Palaeography in an Archaeological Context: Egypt 1800 BC

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    Handwriting raises issues alive in archaeological debates, philosophical and historical. In turn, by their extreme fragmentariness, the earliest archaeological manuscripts could generate usefully different questions for the field of palaeography. Here, digitisation offers new common ground for the separate disciplines in the study of the past. For current archaeological discussions of structure and agency, manuscripts pose the act of writing, between social and individual. For debates over literacy and power in part- literate societies, an archaeological hoard of manuscript fragments offers opportunities to assess our chances of knowing, for one time and place, how many writings and writers. The largest earliest group of writing on papyrus-paper comprises several thousand small fragments from Lahun in Egypt (about 1850–1750 BC). Traditional methods of recording similarity and difference across the collection can now be accelerated to a point of qualitative change, by applying image-matching software. This paper considers the potential of computer-aided palaeography for generating new research agendas

    The Abbaco Tradition (1300-1500): its role in the development of European algebra

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    Abbaco algebra is a coherent tradition of algebraic problem solving mostly based in the merchant cities of fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italy. This period is roughly situated between two important works dealing with algebra: the Liber Abbaci by Fibonacci (1202) and the Summa di Arithmetica et Geometria by Lucca Pacioli (1492). Such continuous tradition of mathematical practice was hardly known before the first transcriptions of extant manuscripts by Gino Arrighi from the 1960’s and the ground-breaking work by Warren van Egmond (1980). After some decades of manuscript study and the recent assessment of Jens Hþyrup (2007) we now have a better understanding of this tradition. In this paper we provide an overview of the basic characteristics of the abbaco tradition and discuss the role it played towards the new symbolic algebra as it emerged in sixteenth-century Europe. We argue that its influence on the sixteenth century has largely been ignored and that the new ars analytica from the French algebraists should be understood as establishing new foundations for the general practice of abbaco problem solving

    Vat. copt. 57: A Codicological, Literary, and Paratextual Analysis

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    MS Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Vat. copt. 57, a collection of homi- lies attributed to John Chrysostom in Bohairic Coptic, poses a number of challenges to scholars. Questions such as, Can we identify the texts, and what is their rela- tionship to their Greek models? Can we know who the copyist(s) was or were? are approached by a team of scholars in a collaborative stud

    Text Line Segmentation of Historical Documents: a Survey

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    There is a huge amount of historical documents in libraries and in various National Archives that have not been exploited electronically. Although automatic reading of complete pages remains, in most cases, a long-term objective, tasks such as word spotting, text/image alignment, authentication and extraction of specific fields are in use today. For all these tasks, a major step is document segmentation into text lines. Because of the low quality and the complexity of these documents (background noise, artifacts due to aging, interfering lines),automatic text line segmentation remains an open research field. The objective of this paper is to present a survey of existing methods, developed during the last decade, and dedicated to documents of historical interest.Comment: 25 pages, submitted version, To appear in International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, On line version available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/k2813176280456k3
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