4 research outputs found

    Quantifying scribal behavior : a novel approach to digital paleography

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    We propose a novel approach for analyzing scribal behavior quantitatively using information about the handwriting of characters. To implement this approach, we develop a computational framework that recovers this information and decomposes the characters into primitives (called strokes) to create a hierarchically structured representation. We then propose a number of intuitive metrics quantifying various facets of scribal behavior, which are derived from the recovered information and character structure. We further propose the use of techniques modeling the generation of handwriting to directly study the changes in writing behavior. We then present a case study in which we use our framework and metrics to analyze the development of four major Indic scripts. We show that our framework and metrics coupled with appropriate statistical methods can provide great insight into scribal behavior by discovering speciïŹc trends and phenomena with quantitative methods. We also illustrate the use of handwriting modeling techniques in this context to study the divergence of the Brahmi script into two daughter scripts. We conduct a user study with domain experts to evaluate our framework and salient results from the case study, and we elaborate on the results of this evaluation. Finally, we present our conclusions and discuss the limitations of our research along with future work that needs to be done

    Scriptinformatics

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    Scripts (writing systems) usually belong to specific languages and have temporal, spatial and cultural characteristics. The evolution of scripts has been the subject of research for a long time. This is probably because the long-term development of human thinking is reflected in the surviving script relics, many of which are still undeciphered today. The book presents the study of the script evolution with the mathematical tools of systematics, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. In the research described, the script is the evolutionary taxonomic unit (taxon), which is analogous to the concept of biological species. Among the methods of phylogenetics, phenetics classifies the investigated taxa on the basis of their morphological similarity, and does not primarily examine genealogical relationships. Due to the scarcity of morphological diversity of scripts’ features, random coincidences of evolution-independent features are much more common in scripts than in biological species, thus phenetic modelling based solely on morphological features can lead to erroneous results. For this reason, phenetic modeling has been extended with evolutionary considerations, thereby allowing the modelling uncertainties observed in the script evolution to be addressed due to the large number of random coincidences (homoplasies) characterizing each script. The book describes an extended phenetic method developed to investigate the script evolution. This data-driven approach helps to reduce the impact of the uncertainties inherent in the phenetic model due to the large number of homoplasies that occur during the evolution of scripts. The elaborated phenetic and evolutionary analyses were applied to the Rovash scripts used on the Eurasian Steppe (Grassland), including the Turkic Rovash (Turkic Runic/runiform) and the SzĂ©kely-Hungarian Rovash. The evaluation of the extended phenetic model of the scripts, the various phenograms, the script spectra and the group spectra helped to reconstruct the main ancestors and evolutionary stages of the investigated scripts

    Estimating the Distinctiveness of Graphemes and Allographs in Palaeographic Classification

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    Within the discipline of palaeography, the ‘morphological ’ approach tries to describe the lettershape as a whole, so a letter may be described as a ‘Caroline a ’ or as an ‘insular r’. Aspects of this approach are visible in almost all palaeographical handbooks, particularly those that provide alphabets or selections of letter-forms. An example is Albert Derolez’s, Palaeography of Gothi

    ÍrĂĄsemlĂ©kek grafĂ©maalakjainak tĂ©rstatisztikai Ă©s fenetikai elemzĂ©se [Spatial Statistical and Phenetic Analysis of Glyphs of Script Relics].

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    An evolutionary computation method was elaborated to model the evo-lution of the scripts. The developed similarity feature groups contain the possi-ble lineage models of the graphemes of the examined scripts. The elaborated method was applied in the examination of the evolution of the Rovash scripts as taxons, some of the writing systems of the people of the Eurasian Steppe, including the Turkic Rovash (Turkic runiform) and the Székely-Hungarian Rovash among others. Using the phenetic model of the scripts concerned with the cladistic considerations, the analysis of the newly developed areal spec-trum, the script spectrum and the group spectrum supported the preliminary as-sumption that the four examined scripts had a single common predecessor, the so-called Proto-Rovash
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