11,554 research outputs found
Transcribing Medieval Manuscripts for Machine Learning
In the early twentieth century, many scholars focused on the preparation of
editions and translations of texts previously available only to the few
specialists able to read archaic hands and privileged enough to travel to work
in person with them in manuscript. Valuable scholarship in its own right, the
preparation of these editions and translations for particular texts deemed
important enough to justify the effort and time, laid the foundation for
generations of scholarship in medieval studies. On the other hand, for many
materials in historical archival collections, including already digitised
collections, medievalists have only had the time to create partial
transcriptions, if any at all. Access to textual material from the medieval
period has increased greatly in recent years with digitisation, and we are able
to imagine many new research projects in decades to come. What challenges do
new frontiers of automation in the archives raise with respect to medieval
studies and in particular to the ways we transcribe? In this article, we argue
that if medievalists hope to pursue the kinds of analysis that goes on in
advanced computational research, we will need new kinds of transcriptions,
intentionally theorized not only for human reading, but also for machine
processing. We already have mature methods for remediating generations of
editions of medieval works such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), but we
can ask ourselves if these are the kinds of text we want to use for future
computational analysis. We suggest instead that one way forward is by going
back to the scriptorium
Collaborative authorship in the twelfth century: a stylometric study of Hildegard of Bingen and Guibert of Gembloux
Abstract – Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) is one of the most influential female authors of the Middle Ages. From the point of view of computational stylistics, the oeuvre attributed to Hildegard is fascinating. Hildegard dictated her texts to secretaries in Latin, a language of which she did not master all grammatical subtleties. She therefore allowed her scribes to correct her spelling and grammar. Especially Hildegard’s last collaborator, Guibert of Gembloux, seems to have considerably reworked her works during his secretaryship. Whereas her other scribes were only allowed to make superficial linguistic changes, Hildegard would have permitted Guibert to render her language stylistically more elegant. In this article, we focus on two shorter texts: the Visio ad Guibertum missa and Visio de sancto Martino, both of which Hildegard allegedly authored during Guibert’s secretaryship. We analyse a corpus containing the letter collections of Hildegard, Guibert and Bernard of Clairvaux using a number of common stylometric techniques. We discuss our results in the light of the Synergy Hypothesis, suggesting that texts resulting from collaboration can display a style markedly different from that of the collaborating authors. Finally, we demonstrate that Guibert must have reworked the disputed visionary texts allegedly authored by Hildegard to such an extent that style-oriented computational procedures attribute the texts to Guibert
Jewish Studies in the Digital Age
The digitisation boom of the last two decades, and the rapid advancement of digital tools to analyse data in myriad ways, have opened up new avenues for humanities research. This volume discusses how the so-called digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies, explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems in the field
Computational analysis of medieval manuscripts: a new tool for analysis and mapping of medieval documents to modern orthography
Medieval manuscripts or other written documents from that period contain
valuable information about people, religion, and politics of the medieval period, making
the study of medieval documents a necessary pre-requisite to gaining in-depth knowledge
of medieval history. Although tool-less study of such documents is possible and has
been ongoing for centuries, much subtle information remains locked such manuscripts
unless it gets revealed by effective means of computational analysis. Automatic analysis
of medieval manuscripts is a non-trivial task mainly due to non-conforming styles,
spelling peculiarities, or lack of relational structures (hyper-links), which could be used
to answer meaningful queries. Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and algorithms
are used to carry out computational analysis of text data. However due to high
percentage of spelling variations in medieval manuscripts, NLP tools and algorithms
cannot be applied directly for computational analysis. If the spelling variations are
mapped to standard dictionary words, then application of standard NLP tools and algorithms
becomes possible. In this paper we describe a web-based software tool CAMM
(Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts) that maps medieval spelling variations
to a modern German dictionary. Here we describe the steps taken to acquire,
reformat, and analyze data, produce putative mappings as well as the steps taken to
evaluate the findings. At the time of the writing of this paper, CAMM provides access
to 11275 manuscripts organized into 54 collections containing a total of 242446
distinctly spelled words. CAMM accurately corrects spelling of 55% percent of the verifiable
words.Thanks to Georg Vogeler for his valuable suggestions about the algorithms.
Thanks also to Jochen Graf and the Monasterium consortium for having given
us access to the medieval dataset and for sharing valuable information about the
existing EditMOM tools. Thanks to the Athabasca University, for providing a
server to launch this tool, and thanks to theWeb Unit of the Computing Services
Department at Athabasca for keeping the link alive.http://www.jucs.org/;internal&action=noaction&Parameter=1208164030958am201
A pebble smoothed by tradition: lines 607-61 of Beowulf as a formulaic set-piece
"In lines 607-61 of Beowulf, just before the battle between the hero and the monster
Grendel, the Danes and visiting Geats celebrate their comradeship in the great hall of Heorot.
While venerable Hrothgar, king of the Danes, presides, Queen Wealhtheow, bedecked with gold,
carries the ornamented cup of fellowship to each warrior in turn, old and young alike. The
passage, which for convenience we will call “Wealhtheow’s cup-bearing,” is one of several
depictions in Beowulf of the social happiness that Anglo-Saxon poetry often calls dream (“joy”)
and has been described as “the most detailed description we possess of the offering of the
ceremonial drinking cup to an honored guest in early Germanic society” (Fulk, Bjork, and Niles
2008:155). But in contrast to Wealhtheow’s later appearance in the poem (lines 1168b-231)—in
which she thwarts Hrothgar’s attempted adoption of Beowulf, promotes the king’s nephew
Hrothulf as a protector for her sons, and gives the legendary Brosing necklace to the hero—
nothing much happens. Jeff Opland (1976:446-57) does not include the passage in his list of “joy
in the hall” type-scenes. Yet new computer-assisted “lexomic” methods of analysis show that these seemingly
banal lines contain some of the highest concentrations of unusual lexical, metrical, grammatical,
and formulaic features in Beowulf, and the overall distribution of vocabulary in the passage is so
distinctive that it affects computer-assisted cluster analysis to a greater extent than any other
similar-sized segment of the poem. In the discussion that follows, we introduce several
techniques of lexomic analysis and explain how these approaches identify qualitative differences
between lines 607-61 and the rest of the poem. We then show how all of these differences are
best explained by positing that the passage has a source different from its surrounding textual
matrix, a source that was most likely not a written text, but a traditional type-scene. A close
reading of the lines in the light of recent approaches to the formula in Old English explains how
the passage, so well polished by tradition that it preserved low-level linguistic features to almost
the same degree as a written source would, could nevertheless have been easily adapted to other
narrative contexts."--Pages 191-192
Reading Narrative Images: Visual Literacy in Medieval Romance Texts and Illuminated Manuscripts
This study examines the instructive aspects of visual material in medieval romance texts and their illuminated manuscripts. Medieval romance contains an extensive array of visual references, and the present discussion focuses on the phenomenology of these episodes: depictions of the aesthetic and intellectual aftereffects of sight, and the imagination at work. Such instances are often related within the text to the act of reading itself, and through them the author encourages correct and effective practices of reading. In romance texts the characters often struggle to interpret such signs, sometimes with disastrous consequences, and their reactions in turn become lessons for the reader. The first section of the discussion focuses on romance texts, and particularly on depictions of image-crafting, the imagination at work, and the recognition and interpretation of visual signs. The discussion in the second section concentrates on illuminated romance manuscripts, and examines the authorial perspectives expressed through narrative illustration. The visual material of medieval romance is largely concerned with communication, and the didactic conversation that occurs between author and reader is implicit within the romance text. This study therefore demonstrates that the visual material in medieval romance narratives often has a practical function: to establish a dialogue between the author and reader, and sometimes the limner and reader, concerning good reading practices
Jewish Studies in the Digital Age
The digitisation boom of the last two decades, and the rapid advancement of digital tools to analyse data in myriad ways, have opened up new avenues for humanities research. This volume discusses how the so-called digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies, explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems in the field
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