Digitizing Medieval Archives
  • Introduction
  • Overview of the Course
  • Assignments
  • Lead a seminar
  • Readings
  • Week 1 & 2 - Setting Up
    • Signing Up
    • Using Twitter
    • Twitter Strategies
    • Twitter Abbreviations
  • Week 3 - Omeka
    • Dublin Core
  • Week 4 - Github
    • Markdown
    • Github
    • Turning Github into a website
    • Markdown II (Optional)
  • Week 5 - Writing Supports
    • Your first transcription
    • Getting prepared for Transkribus
  • Week 6 - Palæography
    • Distinguishing Late Medieval Scripts
    • Handwriting Analysis Tools
    • Installing Medieval Unicode
    • IRL Abbreviations
  • Week 7 - Abbreviations
    • Transcribing with Transkribus
    • Transcribing
    • Java 8
  • Week 8 - Codicology
    • Codicological Spreadsheet
  • Week 9 - Liturgical Genres
    • Medieval Liturgy - Basic Bibliography
  • Week 10 - Cataloguing
    • Template for Folio Cataloguing
  • Week 11 - Workday
  • Week 12 - Whetting your Digital Appetite
  • Week 13 - The Theory of the Digital
    • Github Project Boards
  • Week 14 - The Promise of DH
    • Criteria for Evaluating DH Projects
  • Week 15 - Capturing Manuscripts
    • How to take photos of documents
    • Image File Formats
  • Week 16 - IIIF
    • Our IIIF Images
    • Understanding IIIF Image Presentation
    • Using IIIF Manifests
  • Week 17 - IIIF Annotations
    • Annotations in Mirador
    • Annotations with Transkribus
  • Week 18 - Online Exhibits
  • Week 19 - TEI
    • Look at a TEI folio description
    • Digital Latin Library
    • TEI export from Transkribus
  • Week 20 - Accessibility and Longevity
  • Week 21 - Work
  • Week 22 - Work
  • Week 23 - Presentations I
  • Week 24 - Presentations II
  • Week 25 - End of the Line
  • About
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  • Archetype Ink
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  1. Week 6 - Palæography

Handwriting Analysis Tools

PreviousDistinguishing Late Medieval ScriptsNextInstalling Medieval Unicode

Last updated 6 years ago

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:

  • , by Arianna Ciula, Digital Medievalist 1 (2005).

  • , par Dominique Stutzmann, Digital Medievalist 10 (4 juin 2016).

  • , 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 , 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. are instructions about how to do so and how to get started; more documentation on their .

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 is being worked on at the 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 . This tool is designed for use on Windows computers, but can be used on a MacOS via a virtual machine or . 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:

« Digital palaeography : using the digital representation of medieval script to support palaeographic analysis »
« Clustering of Medieval Scripts through Computer Image Analysis : Towards an Evaluation Protocol »
« Artificial Paleography : Computational Approaches to Identifying Script Types in Medieval Manuscripts »
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Github site
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Centre for the study of Manuscript Cultures
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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.