Historical Analyses of Disordered Handwriting

Handwritten texts carry significant information, extending beyond the meaning of their words. Modern neurology, for example, benefits from the interpretation of the graphic features of writing and drawing for the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases and disorders. This article examines how handwriting analysis can be used, and has been used historically, as a methodological tool for the assessment of medical conditions and how this enhances our understanding of historical contexts of writing. We analyze handwritten material, writing tests and letters, from patients in an early 20th-century psychiatric hospital in southern Germany (Irsee/Kaufbeuren). In this institution, early psychiatrists assessed handwriting features, providing us novel insights into the earliest practices of psychiatric handwriting analysis, which can be connected to Berkenkotter’s research on medical admission records. We finally consider the degree to which historical handwriting bears semiotic potential to explain the psychological state and personality of a writer, and how future research in written communication should approach these sources

Teleologische Perspektiven auf die althochdeutsche Überlieferung und ihre Konsequenzen für den Quellenwert von Glossen

Darstellungen des Althochdeutschen basieren oftmals auf teleologischen Vorannahmen. Anhand der Diskussion zweier Modelle, denen solche Perspektivierungen zugrunde liegen, zeigt dieser Artikel, wie hierbei die damalige Sprachrealität verzerrt dargestellt und ein Großteil der Überlieferung ausgeblendet wird. Konsequenzen daraus werden in der Althochdeutschen Grammatik sichtbar, wo u.a. die Graphien einiger Glossen auf Grund ihrer Abweichung von einer am Vorbild literarischer Texte gesetzten Norm abgewertet werden. Anhand der Griffelglossen im Freisinger Codex Clm 6300 wird gezeigt, dass derartige Graphien systematisiert und in diesem Beispiel erklärt werden können als Resultate nähesprachlicher Verschriftungsakte. Nimmt man derartige Überlieferungsquellen ernst, so liefern sie neue Einblicke in die soziokulturellen Kontexte der frühesten Verschriftung des Deutschen sowie in historische Sprachwandelprozesse

Intraindividuelle Variation auf lexikalisch-semantischer Ebene bei unroutinierten Schreibern des 19. Jahrhunderts

Lexis and semantics are under-researched fields both in contemporary and historical sociolinguistics. This paper focuses on intra-speaker variation in texts written by unroutined writers of the 19th century and examines different types of variation in the areas of lexis and semantics. Our data are taken from a new corpus of historical patients’ documents (see http://copadocs.de), which is currently being compiled as part of our research project “Flexible Writers in Language History”. In order to analyse lexical-semantic variation, we combine a number of different methods. An onomasiological approach is used to explore one writer’s linguistic repertoire and use of terms for women, while a structural approach allows us to compare functionally equivalent structures, such as routine formulae and expressions of a writer’s origo (e.g. I, here, now). Finally, we examine the use of emotional lexis in texts by writers diagnosed with melancholia, which is found to be more frequent as compared to a control group. Our findings provide evidence for considerable intra-speaker variation in lower-class writing. In addition, the emphasis on lexis is shown to have particular value for the investigation of patients’ texts, as this approach provides insights into the stylistic repertoires of historical writers which would otherwise remain hidden

ilastik: interactive machine learning for (bio)image analysis

We present ilastik, an easy-to-use interactive tool that brings machine-learning-based (bio)image analysis to end users without substantial computational expertise. It contains pre-defined workflows for image segmentation, object classification, counting and tracking. Users adapt the workflows to the problem at hand by interactively providing sparse training annotations for a nonlinear classifier. ilastik can process data in up to five dimensions (3D, time and number of channels). Its computational back end runs operations on-demand wherever possible, allowing for interactive prediction on data larger than RAM. Once the classifiers are trained, ilastik workflows can be applied to new data from the command line without further user interaction. We describe all ilastik workflows in detail, including three case studies and a discussion on the expected performance

Historical Analyses of Disordered Handwriting : Perspectives on Early 20th-Century Material From a German Psychiatric Hospital

Handwritten texts carry significant information, extending beyond the meaning of their words. Modern neurology, for example, benefits from the interpretation of the graphic features of writing and drawing for the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases and disorders. This article examines how handwriting analysis can be used, and has been used historically, as a methodological tool for the assessment of medical conditions and how this enhances our understanding of historical contexts of writing. We analyze handwritten material, writing tests and letters, from patients in an early 20th-century psychiatric hospital in southern Germany (Irsee/Kaufbeuren). In this institution, early psychiatrists assessed handwriting features, providing us novel insights into the earliest practices of psychiatric handwriting analysis, which can be connected to Berkenkotter’s research on medical admission records. We finally consider the degree to which historical handwriting bears semiotic potential to explain the psychological state and personality of a writer, and how future research in written communication should approach these sources