Digital Approaches to Paleography and Book History: Some Challenges, Present and Future

Quantitative methods and the use of technology in paleography and book history are by no means new. The New Palaeographical Society took advantage of the latest printing techniques to produce its albums of facsimiles in the late nineteenth century (Thompson et al., 1903–1930); Jean Mallon began using film in the 1930s to illustrate the development of script (Poulle, 1977); Gilissen (1973) was applying statistical measures to script long before widespread access to computers; and even Mabillon (1681) used advanced printing methods in his foundational study of 1681. Smith (1938) applied innovations in photography for the recovery of damaged or illegible script in the 1930s, and Malachi Beit-Arie’s database of Hebrew manuscripts began in the 1960s and remains one of – probably – the most important works of quantitative codicology. This list is by no means complete, and it demonstrates a continued interest in finding new ways to help us understand books and documents. However, it is also clear that recent developments have dramatically transformed the field. It is now 10 years since publication of what is perhaps the seminal article in what has since become known as “digital” or “computational” paleography (Ciula, 2005). Much excellent work has been done since then, and the whole field of paleography has perhaps been reinvigorated as a result [see, for instance, Rehbein et al. (2009), Fischer et al. (2011), Nelson and Terras (2012), Hassner et al. (2013)]. Nevertheless, much remains to be done, both within paleography in the narrow sense and also, probably even more so, in other areas of book history and diplomatic. Regarding paleography, much work in the last 10 years has been done on questions of “who,” “when,” “where,” and “what”: what was written, by whom, when, and where? However, there is very much more to paleography than this. What about questions of technique, such as searching for “stabbing” strokes that might indicate a scribe used to writing on wax, or changes in scribal “equilibrium,” which might suggest expertise, forgery, or imitation (Stokes, 2011, 2014)?