“Why can’t computer real old scripts and why does it matter. Historical document image analysis and cultural history of script”, Dr Dominique Stutzmann (École Pratique des Hautes Études and Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes)

Date: Wednesday 24 June
Time: 10:00am-12:00pm
Venue: Kevin Lee Room, Level 6, Lobby H, Quadrangle Building A14, The University of Sydney
Enquiries: Dr Hélène Sirantoine: helene.sirantoine@sydney.edu.au

Written texts are both abstract and physical objects: ideas, signs and shapes, whose meanings and graphical systems and social connotations evolve through time. Beyond authorship and writer identification or palaeographical dating of textual witnesses, the materiality of text and the connexion between the ideas and their written instantiations are a matter of cultural history, historic se- miology, and history of communication and representations. In the context of large, growing digital libraries of texts and digitized medieval and early modern manuscripts, the question of the cultur- al significance of script and the “dual nature” of texts may at last be addressed. However, computers cannot read old scripts yet, because of their immense diversity and variability. At the same time, diversity and variability have always been key concepts in the Humanities, as a factor of changes and historical evolutions as well as the core phenomenon between normativity, social control and individuali- ty. Variability in written cultures is an issue for communication and literacy studies, linguistics, philology, history, palaeography, diplo- matics, but also psychology and neurosciences.

This paper will give an insight into the several issues and new tech- niques applied in order to let machines cope with older handwrit- ten texts, at each stage of the historical investigation: script classi- fication and taxonomy; identification of formality and variability; identification of signs and texts. Artificial intelligence and machine learning, associated with human-machine interaction, are part of the process of understanding what is written, how it is written and what is the meaning that is conveyed or connoted.

Dr Dominique Stutzmann is a palaeographer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, Paris.