Congratulations to Mark Faulkner, Ussher Associate Professor in Medieval Literature, Dr Elisabetta Magnanti (TCD / Vienna) and Prof. Dominique Stutzmann (CNRS-IRHT, Paris) who have been awarded a one-year Biblissima Exploratory Project grant worth €26,000 for a project on Measuring and Recording Manuscript Word Division Using Handwritten Text Recognition, which will start in October.
Biblissima, the Observatory of Written Cultures, from Clay to Print, funded by the French Government from 2022-2029, brings together 16 institutions and one private company to create multi-site digital infrastructure for primary research and service devoted to the history of transmission of ancient texts. Its activities are organised into seven clusters, including Cluster 3, focused on Artificial Intelligence, into which this project falls.
The Middle Ages saw the transition from scriptio continua, where letters were written continuously across the page, to their eventual canonical division by spaces into individual words. This transition is especially interesting for vernacular languages, like Old English and Old French, where scribal experiments with word spacing can be said to bring into being the word as a unit of discourse in those languages. However, human perception and judgement of word spacing has been shown to be strongly affected by our awareness of the meaning of the text, so that humans are not neutral reporters of where spaces occur and how large they are. Accordingly, this newly-funded project seeks to harness computer vision to record spaces between words in manuscripts with new accuracy, developing a set of protocols for measuring and recording word spacing in medieval manuscripts within the Biblissima portal, with case studies of manuscripts now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and Bibliothèque Municipale in Rouen in Latin, Old English and Old French (as a vernacular comparandum for Old English), ranging in date from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries.