CSMCCentre for the Study of
Manuscript Cultures

We would like to thank all the participants and contributors for making IWCP such a successful and fruitful event. Participants from different disciplines enriched the discussions with a variety of perspectives and viewpoints. During this workshop, nine accepted papers and six abstracts were discussed.

 

Description

Computational paleography is an emerging field investigating new computational approaches applied on ancient documents. Paleography, understood as the study of ancient writing systems (scripts and their components) as well as their material (characteristics of the physical inscribed objects), can benefit greatly from recent technological advances in computer vision and instrumental analytics. Computational paleography, being truly interdisciplinary, creates opportunities for experts from different research fields to meet, discuss, and exchange ideas. Collaborations between manuscript specialists in the humanities rarely overcome the chronological and geographical boundaries of each discipline. However, when it comes to applying optical, chemical, or computational analysis, these boundaries are often no longer relevant. On the other hand, computer scientists are keen to confront their methodologies with actual research questions based on solid data. Natural scientists working either on the physical properties of the written artefacts or on the production of their digital “avatar” are the third link in this chain of knowledge. In many cases, only a collaboration between experts from these three communities can yield significant results.

In this full-day workshop, we aim to bring together specialists from the different research fields analysing handwritten scripts on ancient artefacts. It targets computer scientists, natural scientists and humanists involved in the study of ancient scripts. Our goal is to offer room to present achieved results as well as starting or ongoing projects and to create the adequate conditions for in-depth discussions. By fostering discussion between these communities, it facilitates future interdisciplinary collaborations that tackle actual research questions on ancient manuscripts which in turn contribute to a wider understanding and accessibility of these major cultural heritage treasures for the society.

The workshop is planned for a full day with a keynote talk, oral presentations, and lively discussions. Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed and accepted submissions will be presented in the workshop and published with ICDAR proceedings in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

If you have any question about the workshop, please send an email to Dr Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello( i.marthot-santaniello"AT"unibas.ch) and Dr Hussein Mohammed( hussein.adnan.mohammed"AT"uni-hamburg.de).

Topics of Interest

• Handwriting Style Analysis and Classification
• Hand-made Pattern Detection and Recognition
• Writer Identification and Retrieval
• Analysis of Writing Components (clusterings, measurement, classification)
• Manuscript clustering according to measurement of key features in scripts and layout
• Reconstruction of damaged Handwriting (e.g. damaged characters or words)
• Material analysis leading to handwriting recognition and/or visibility enhancement
• Best practices with respect to digitisation and preprocessing of manuscript
• Reconstruction of writing processes
• Provenance studies
• Dating terminus post quem
• Layout analysis
• Quantitative methods applied to Paleography
• Software tools designed for paleography
• Virtual Research Environments, Virtual Libraries and annotated corpora supporting paleographical research (e.g. IIIF-based)
• NLP applied to digitized images (and not already existing transcriptions) and/or leading to better understanding of the written elements

Dates

Dates
Submission Deadline: May 03, 2024 May 07, 2024 (Final)
Acceptance Notification: May 31, 2024
Camera Ready: June 14, 2024
Workshop: August 31, 2024