# Handwriting Analysis Tools

The field of computational palaeography has been developing for decades but it only recently starting to show some real promise. Some very good online articles are:

*  [« Digital palaeography : using the digital representation of medieval script to support palaeographic analysis »](http://www.menestrel.fr/Digital%20palaeography:%20using%20the%20digital%20representation%20of%20medieval%20script%20to%20support%20palaeographic%20analysis), by Arianna Ciula, Digital Medievalist 1 (2005). 
*  [« Clustering of Medieval Scripts through Computer Image Analysis : Towards an Evaluation Protocol »](https://doi.org/10.16995/dm.61), par Dominique Stutzmann, Digital Medievalist 10 (4 juin 2016).
* [« Artificial Paleography : Computational Approaches to Identifying Script Types in Medieval Manuscripts »](https://doi.org/10.1086/694112), by Mike Kestemont, Vincent Christlein, and Dominique Stutzmann, Speculum 92, no S1 (2 octobre 2017): 86‑109.

Here are some other tools you can use to play with manuscripts and their scripts:

### Archetype Ink

As it describes itself on its [Twitter bio](https://twitter.com/archetype_ink), Archetype (previously DigiPal) is "an integrated suite of web-based, open source tools for the study of medieval handwriting, art and iconography. The tool remains in development and though only an early version exists for Windows, a stable version exists for Mac and Ubuntu/ Linux. You install the program via Docker. [Here](https://hub.docker.com/r/kingsdigitallab/archetype/?ref=login) are instructions about how to do so and how to get started; more documentation on their [Github site](https://github.com/kcl-ddh/digipal/wiki). 

The tool is designed to identify letter forms, compare them, and allow you to pinpoint key features you can use to identify scripts. 

### HAT-2

One [promising project](https://www.manuscript-cultures.uni-hamburg.de/hat_e.html) is being worked on at the [Centre for the study of Manuscript Cultures](https://www.manuscript-cultures.uni-hamburg.de/lab_e.html) at the University of Hamburg (Germany). As it describes itself in the manual, HAT-2 is "a software tool that can be used to analyse handwriting styles. Several different handwriting styles (scribal hands) can be analysed concurrently and sorted according to their similarity to a questioned or unknown style (query). A similarity score will be calculated for each predefined style (scribal hand) to create a relative comparison between them with respect to an unknown style."

You can download the installation file [here](http://www.manuscript-cultures.uni-hamburg.de/hat/Handwriting_Analysis_Tool%202_HAT_2.zip). This tool is designed for use on Windows computers, but can be used on a MacOS  via a virtual machine or [Wine](https://www.winehq.org/). The manual with instructions for set up and how to use the tool is located in the zipfile. 

You can find a very dense and complex explanation of the work underlying the Handwriting Analysis Tool (HAT) here: 

[H. Mohammed, V. Märgner, T. Konidaris, and H. S. Stiehl, “Normalised local näive bayes nearest-neighbour classifier for offline writer identification”, in 2017 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR). *IEEE*, 2017, pp. 1013–1018.](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8270099/)