Training eyes and training hands in the digital research with manuscripts

Abstract

We could say that the relevance of the contributions in this special volume dedicated to paleography and manuscript culture in today’s digital environment is borne out by Cornelis van Lit’s (2020) recent emphatic assessment: “I would argue that paleography is perhaps the most digital field of all of manuscript studies, even though the perception within the field is at times to the contrary.” On the other hand, the growing specialized bibliography, and also the emergence of aspects that interrelate paleography and computers in high-level scientific journals, fuels a state of affairs centered on a revival of research using original manuscript sources, particularly from a general dimension endorsed by the digital humanities (Stutzmann, 2017), (Albritton, Henley, Treharne, eds., 2020) or more specifically by the digital philology (Bamford and Francomano, 2018). The majority of the texts included herein originate in the presentations made at the University Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) seminar entitled “Analogic and Digital: looks on digital paleography and manuscript culture nowadays,” held on October 24-25, 2019 and supported by its Vice Rectorate of Scientific Policy. In the sessions, a group of paleographers, archivists, calligraphers, materials engineers, historians of written culture, graphic designers, linguists and philologists and experts on image and photographic reproduction, came together to try to integrate our respective fields in a review of a markedly practical and creative nature of our respective work with old manuscripts. Our dialog fostered, for example, the communication between paleographers and computer scientists that is essential for designing the functional requirements of the computerized paleographic systems, the role played by contemporary calligraphic creativity in the study of medieval and early modern handwriting typologies, or the search for the necessary international standards in the capture phases of multiand hyperspectral photographs of an original manuscript text. We finished up with a discussion about the need to integrate paleography and advanced study of historical witnesses in a proposal of a manufactual nature and from the standpoint of stroke mastery for interpreting manuscript cultural heritage and applying techniques for document digital Image Processing (Doermann and Tombre, 2014) and Handwritten Text Recognition. These are shown in the leading projects developed by the Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology (PRHLT) research center (Universitat Politècnica de València) or the Pattern Recognition and Document Analysis Group (DAG) of the Computer Vision Center (CVC) (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). Movement (whether through the rhythm, velocity or direction of the motion of the writing instrument), materiality and evolution are the vectors that define the approach taken in these pages, a clearly Darwinian approach compared to the Linnaean or classificatory/taxonomic one used in paleography (Stansbury, 2009). This is an approach or way of understanding paleography (analogical and digital) in which a key organizing element is the deep review of the grapheme and individualization of the graphic elements that define it (Ruiz, 1992) to facilitate segmentation (Fernández, Lladós, Fornés, 2014), decomposition of the constituent elements of the alphabetic sign and, particularly, calligraphic reinterpretation of the ductus in order to transfer it to the digital environment (Köhler, 2008), (Cloppet, 2011). The fact that the seminar was organized by the Library and Information Sciences Department (UC3M), an accredited international Information School, is not insignificant. The multidisciplinary interest of information, library and archive professionals indeed encounters an appropriate workspace centered on paleography and archival documents that