Peter Stokes, Describing Handwriting - Again
When considering the identification of characters and scripts, two important aspects that were identified in the 2012 Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop on computing and palaeography are ontologies and mid-level features. This paper focussed on those two aspects, partly in deliberate contrast to the highly computational approach that most studies in the field have taken to date. To this end, problems not only of terminology but also of conceptual ambiguity and imprecision in palaeography were introduced. The ontology developed for the DigiPal project was briefly presented as a response to this, including the way that it has been used in practice for describing writing in the Latin and Hebrew alphabets as well as for decoration; initial work has also been done to use it for Greek and Latin inscriptions and cursive Latin script. The ontology was presented not as an ideal solution but rather as a pragmatic one that has proven useful in a variety of circumstances, and as a starting-point to a very difficult problem with many challenges that still remain. The second part of the talk considered possible mid-level features, presenting a selection of potential characteristics of handwriting that are relevant to palaeographers and that seem to this author to be relatively easily amenable to computational analysis but which seem not to have been considered in practice. These included ‘stabbing’ strokes (perhaps indicating a scribe accustomed to writing on wax), ‘equilibrium’ (the regularity or otherwise of strokes, perhaps a sign of fluency, experience, forgery or imitation), and the effective visualisation of these particularly in the context of other factors such as the codicological structure of the book. As an aside, DigiPal’s RESTful API was also introduced as a potential source of annotated images for the training of computer vision systems. None of these methods or approaches is necessarily appropriate for writer identification, but they suggest other directions in which computer vision might be taken and which perhapsare more pertinent to research in medieval manuscripts than some of the work done to date. Acknowledgements. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) under grant agreement no. 263751. References T. Hassner, M. Rehbein, P.A. Stokes, L. Wolf (eds). Computation and Palaeography: Po-tentials and Limits. Dagstuhl Manifestos 2(1):14–35, 2013. DOI: 10.4230/DagMan.2.1.14 DigiPal: Digital Resource and Database of Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic . London: 2011–14. http://www.digipal.eu/ P.A. Stokes, S. Brookes, G. Noël, G. Buomprisco, D. Matos and M. Watson. The DigiPalFramework for Script and Image. Digital Humanities 2014 Book of Abstracts.
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