Into the Wide – Into the Deep: Manuscript Research in the Digital Age. Introduction

Manuscript research is a wide field of scholarship which is integrated in core disciplines such as history, philology, or library science. Yet manuscript research is also crucial in other fields such as archaeology, history of arts, musicology or Egyptology, to name but a few. For all these disciplines, manuscripts are fundamental sources. There are different approaches to different types of manuscripts, but questions and perspectives, methodologies and tools are often quite similar. Innovations and new research strategies from one discipline can be transferred to and adopted by others. This article is an introduction to the second volume of the anthology "Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age" and gives an overview of current aspects in the field of manuscript studies in both theory and practice by showing the relatedness of the contributions to the volume at hand as well as its predecessor. The texts are roughly assigned to five interrelated areas of manuscript research: (I) the photographic capturing of the manuscript surface, (II) the description of the manuscript for a catalogue, (III) the scientific examination of material aspects, (IV) the analysis of the script and (V) the deep encoding of the text itself

Introduction

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

Manuscriptorium Digital Library and ENRICH Project: Means for Dealing with Digital Codicology and Palaeography

Codicology and palaeography in the digital age can be developed both through adapting existing methods and using information and communication technologies. This can be achieved e.g by projects focusing on the integration of individual resources under a single user interface. This is the aim of the Manuscriptorium digital library as well as the ENRICH project. The integration is based on the centralisation of metadata from various resources and on the distributed storage of data, mainly digital images. This is implemented through a distributed complex digital document, containing the so-called identification record and more data types. The construction of the integrated Manuscriptorium digital library within the ENRICH project is being done in four basic ways: automatically, or semi-automatically respectively manually, and those both online and offline. This has made it possible to amass more than 5,000 documents. For Manuscriptorium, a search is important, which allows information to be gathered through special fields and the differences in graphics to be harmonised. The aim of the ENRICH project is also the creation of tools for the compilation of virtual collections and documents. In its method of integrating resources, the Manuscriptorium endeavours to be an instrument of codicological and palaeographic research

Towards a Comparative Approach to Manuscript Study on the Web: the Case of the Lancelot-Grail Romance

This paper presents an outline of the on-going Lancelot-Grail Project, an interdisciplinary collaborative research project drawing together, analysing, and making available in text and picture the surviving manuscripts of the popular Arthurian romance known as the Lancelot-Grail. The project uses web technology as part of the analytical process and as a means to navigate within the material, presenting models based on the concepts of geographic information systems (GIS) in a non-traditional context

Artefacts and Errors: Acknowledging Issues of Representation in the Digital: Imaging of Ancient Texts

It is assumed, in palaeography, papyrology and epigraphy, that a certain amount of uncertainty is inherent in the reading of damaged and abraded texts. Yet we have not really grappled with the fact that, nowadays, as many scholars tend to deal with digital images of texts, rather than handling the texts themselves, the procedures for creating digital images of texts can insert further uncertainty into the representation of the text created. Technical distortions can lead to the unintentional introduction of ‘artefacts’ into images, which can have an effect on the resulting representation. If we cannot trust our digital surrogates of texts, can we trust the readings from them? How do scholars acknowledge the quality of digitised images of texts? Furthermore, this leads us to the type of discussions of representation that have been present in Classical texts since Plato: digitisation can be considered as an alternative form of representation, bringing to the modern debate of the use of digital technology in Classics the familiar theories of mimesis (imitation) and ekphrasis (description): the conversion of visual evidence into explicit descriptions of that information, stored in computer files in distinct linguistic terms, with all the difficulties of conversion understood in the ekphratic process. The community has not yet considered what becoming dependent on digital texts means for the field, both in practical and theoretical terms. Issues of quality, copying, representation, and substance should be part of our dialogue when we consult digital surrogates of documentary material, yet we are just constructing understandings of what it means to rely on virtual representations of artefacts. It is necessary to relate our understandings of uncertainty in palaeography and epigraphy to our understanding of the mechanics of visualization employed by digital imaging techniques, if we are to fully understand the impact that these will have

Irish Script on Screen: the Growth and Development of a Manuscript Digitisation Project

Irish Script on Screen (ISOS), a project of the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, was initiated in 1998, with the stated aim of the high-resolution digitisation of entire Gaelic manuscripts and of making the digital images freely available on the World Wide Web (www.isos.dias.ie). The growth and development of ISOS has therefore paralleled, and in some cases informed, the evolution of awareness of digital matters in Ireland over the last ten years. This paper describes the history and structure of ISOS, its public reception, its impact on research, and the varying uses that are made of the site. The questions of further potential and future direction are also addressed

The Computer and the Classification of Script

In the 1970s Bernhard Bischoff famously predicted that, thanks to technology, palaeography was on the road to becoming an art of measurement. The journey down this road has not been smooth, however, for several reasons. Although the idea of measurement seems uncontroversial, E.A. Lowe's attempt to measure the number of manuscripts written in half-uncial script shows that the script names that lie at the heart of palaeographical descriptions pose an insuperable problem, whether to man or machine. The reasons for this unsatisfactory system lie in the historical development of the discipline from its invention in the late-17th century. From the first, the names of scripts were used to localise manuscripts in time and place, and the names palaeographers use today are the direct descendants of these early systems. In the mid-20th century palaeographers began to focus on a different way of looking at script by exploring the strokes used to create the letters (ductus). These two approaches have led to a discipline divided between Linnaeans who emphasize taxonomy and Darwinians who emphasize evolution. Most digital palaeography has focused on the first, while the second could offer a richer vein to mine

Digital Palaeography

This article seeks to explore new digital ways of distinguishing between scribal hands in medieval manuscripts. An analysis of traditional palaeographical approaches to hand identification will be followed by a discussion in which attention will be paid both to the use of computer software to enhance existing methods of scribal identification, and to the benefits of "Quill", an innovative automatic writer identification tool. A case study involving a manuscript of the collected works of Christine de Pizan (London, British Library, Harley 4431) will serve to demonstrate that traditional palaeographical methods of analysing scribal hands can greatly benefit from the use of specialised computer software

Semantic Technologies for Manuscript Descriptions — Concepts and Visions

The contribution at hand relates recent developments in the area of the World Wide Web to codicological research. In the last number of years, an informational extension of the internet has been discussed and extensively researched: the Semantic Web. It has already been applied in many areas, including digital information processing of cultural heritage data. The Semantic Web facilitates the organisation and linking of data across websites, according to a given semantic structure. Software can then process this structural and semantic information to extract further knowledge. In the area of codicological research, many institutions are making efforts to improve the online availability of handwritten codices. If these resources could also employ Semantic Web techniques, considerable research potential could be unleashed. However, data acquisition from less structured data sources will be problematic. In particular, data stemming from unstructured sources needs to be made accessible to SemanticWeb tools through information extraction techniques. In the area of museum research, the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) has been widely examined and is being adopted successfully. The CRM translates well to Semantic Web research, and its concentration on contextualization of objects could support approaches in codicological research. Further concepts for the creation and management of bibliographic coherences and structured vocabularies related to the CRM will be considered in this chapter. Finally, a user scenario showing all processing steps in their context will be elaborated on

Recognizing Degraded Handwritten Characters

In this paper, Slavonic manuscripts from the 11th century written in Glagolitic script are investigated. State-of-the-art optical character recognition methods produce poor results for degraded handwritten document images. This is largely due to a lack of suitable results from basic pre-processing steps such as binarization and image segmentation. Therefore, a new, binarization-free approach will be presented that is independent of pre-processing deficiencies. It additionally incorporates local information in order to recognize also fragmented or faded characters. The proposed algorithm consists of two steps: character classification and character localization. Firstly scale invariant feature transform features are extracted and classified using support vector machines. On this basis interest points are clustered according to their spatial information. Then, characters are localized and eventually recognized by a weighted voting scheme of pre-classified local descriptors. Preliminary results show that the proposed system can handle highly degraded manuscript images with background noise, e.g. stains, tears, and faded characters