ICDAR 2024Workshop on Computational Paleography in Athens

17 September 2024

Photo: Hussein Mohammed

On 31 August 2024, the 3rd Workshop on Computational Palaeography took place as part of the 18th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) in Athens. Co-organised by Hussein Mohammed, the workshop dealt with new computational approaches to study ancient documents.

Computational palaeography is an emerging interdisciplinary field at the intersection of computer vision, instrumental analytics, and palaeography – the study of ancient scripts and their physical mediums. One of the primary ways computational paleography advances the study of manuscripts is by automating the labour-intensive processes traditionally performed by human experts. This includes the transcription of handwritten texts, the identification of scribes, script styles, and the dating and localisation of manuscripts. By leveraging large datasets and powerful algorithms, computational techniques can process and analyse texts at a speed and scale that far exceed human capabilities.

On 31 August, the 3rd Workshop on Computational Palaeography brought together specialists from varied backgrounds to discuss recent developments and challenges in this field. Among many other things, it included presentations on the automated dating of medieval manuscripts, deep-learning approaches for script-type analyses, and computational frameworks for transcribing and attributing ancient Greek inscriptions. The papers presented at the workshop have been published here.

The workshop took place as part of the 18th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2024), held from 30 August to 4 September 2024 in Athens, Greece. It was organised by Hussein Mohammed, a computer scientist at the CSMC and Principal Investigator of a project on ‘Similarity Measurement of Visual Patterns in Written Artefacts’, and Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello from the University of Basel. Previous editions of the workshop took place in San José, California, in August 2023, and Lausanne, Switzerland, in September 2021.