The Effects of Character-Level Data Augmentation on Style-Based Dating of Historical Manuscripts

Identifying the production dates of historical manuscripts is one of the main goals for paleographers when studying ancient documents. Automatized methods can provide paleographers with objective tools to estimate dates more accurately. Previously, statistical features have been used to date digitized historical manuscripts based on the hypothesis that handwriting styles change over periods. However, the sparse availability of such documents poses a challenge in obtaining robust systems. Hence, the research of this article explores the influence of data augmentation on the dating of historical manuscripts. Linear Support Vector Machines were trained with k-fold cross-validation on textural and grapheme-based features extracted from historical manuscripts of different collections, including the Medieval Paleographical Scale, early Aramaic manuscripts, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Results show that training models with augmented data improve the performance of historical manuscripts datin g by 1% - 3% in cumulative scores. Additionally, this indicates further enhancement possibilities by considering models specific to the features and the documents’ script

Automatic Dating of Historical Documents

With the growing number of digitized documents available to researchers it is becoming possible to answer scientific questions by simply analyzing the image content. In this article, a new approach for the automatic dating of historical documents is proposed. It is based on an approach only recently proposed for scribe identification. It uses local RootSIFT descriptors which are encoded using VLAD. The method is evaluated using a dataset consisting of context areas of medieval papal charters covering around 150 years from 1049 to 1198 AD. Experimental results show very promising mean absolute errors of about 17 years

Chronological Profiling for Paleography

This paper approaches manuscript dating from a Bayesian perspective. Prior work on paleographic date recovery has generally sought to predict a single date for a manuscript. Bayesian analysis makes it possible to estimate a probability distribution that varies with respect to time. This in turn enables a number of alternative analyses that may be of more use to practitioners. For example, it may be useful to identify a range of years that will include a document’s creation date with a particular confidence level. The methods are demonstrated on a selection of Syriac documents created prior to 1300 CE

Old Hispanic notation and the early written transmission of chant:a study of British Library, Additional Manuscript 30845

In this dissertation, I examine music writing and chant transmission in medieval Iberia through the lens of one manuscript – London, British Library Add. MS 30845 (BL45). BL45 contains chants, prayers and readings for the public services of the Old Hispanic rite from June to November. Through close study of the codicology of the manuscript, its liturgical and musical contents, and identification of the scribes who copied the manuscript I investigate the processes of producing this manuscript. The origins of many Old Hispanic manuscripts cannot be securely attributed. Through an interdisciplinary approach to the contents of BL45, I firmly position BL45 as a product of the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, allowing me to situate BL45 within the broader liturgical, notational and melodic culture of the monastery across the 10th and 11th centuries. The findings of my research challenge the prevailing narrative of homogenous house style in Iberian scriptoria, as well as the existing chronological and geographical narratives regarding the development and transmission of Old Hispanic notation and melodies. As I will show, it is necessary to engage with each of the main features of an Old Hispanic manuscript to gain a fine-grained understanding of Old Hispanic cultural practices from the perspective of the individuals who preserved them in writing. By situating my findings within the broader context of the Old Hispanic materials, I aim to deepen the understanding of this underexplored branch of medieval Christian devotion

Isolated Character Forms from Dated Syriac Manuscripts

This paper describes a set of hand-isolated character samples selected from securely dated manuscripts written in Syriac between 300 and 1300 C.E., which are being made available for research purposes. The collection can be used for a number of applications, including ground truth for character segmentation and form analysis for paleographical dating. Several applications based upon convolutional neural networks demonstrate the possibilities of the data set