Making Croatia’s Trilingual and Triscript Manuscript Heritage Readable: Manuscript Collections, Script Diversity, and the Challenge of Artificial Intelligence

Ivana Dević, Split University Library

Croatian manuscript heritage represents a historically layered, multilingual, and multiscript culture. This presentation approaches it as a distributed manuscript ecosystem shaped by monastic, cathedral, legal, urban, humanist, and frontier contexts. Dalmatia is especially important for such an approach because its territory brings together the ancient Roman legacy, medieval ecclesiastical and legal traditions, Venetian rule, humanist culture, and the Ottoman frontier. In this contact zone, Latin-script, Glagolitic, and Croatian Cyrillic/Bosančica manuscript traditions coexisted with Latin, Croatian Church Slavonic, and Croatian vernacular textual cultures.

The presentation introduces the principal institutional and collection contexts in which this heritage is preserved, with particular attention to the diversity of manuscript forms, collections, and transmission histories in Dalmatia. Rather than treating script diversity simply as the coexistence of three alphabets, the presentation considers writing as a historically situated practice shaped by language, scribal hand, material form, genre, function, institutional context, and transmission history. Selected manuscripts, documentary sources, fragments, liturgical books, and hybrid manuscript–print objects are used as case studies to demonstrate how different artefact types generate different research problems. The final part considers the challenges and opportunities that this heterogeneous material presents for computer-assisted manuscript studies and artificial intelligence.

In a broader perspective, this presentation opens up historical sources that are still practically closed to the wider research community and shows how Croatian manuscript heritage can contribute to discussions on manuscript diversity, material transmission, and computational approaches to complex manuscript cultures.

Ivana Dević is an information science professional and Senior Librarian at the University of Split Library. Her work and research interests include digitisation, digital humanities, metadata and data modelling, interoperability, knowledge organisation, semantic-web technologies, manuscript provenance, and the computational study of cultural-heritage collections.