How can my paleographical analysis be corroborated?
Handwriting Analysis
Olivier Bonnerot, Hussein Adnan Mohammed
Scholars working with manuscripts often have to decide whether two handwritten pages (or even whole codices) were written by one and the same person. The identity of the scribe responsible for copying a manuscript or a large section of it may be known in many instances, but this is not always the case. Determining the identity of particular hands allows us to establish when the undated manuscript was written, how it should be contextualised and whether or not it is an autograph.
We developed a state-of-the-art learning-free pattern classification method for the task of automatic handwriting style analysis in images of written artefacts. The main goal of this computational method is to analyse handwritten documents (or manuscripts) in order to measure the similarities between different handwriting styles as demonstrated in H. Mohammed, V. Märgner and H. S. Stiehl, "Writer Identification for Historical Manuscripts: Analysis and Optimisation of a Classifier as an Easy-to-Use Tool for Scholars from the Humanities,". These similarity measurements can be used, for example, to provide supporting information for the scholars related to the task of scribe identification. More information can be found here.
Material analysis can also be a useful complement to paleographic analysis. The investigation of the ink composition of different parts of a manuscript can in some cases provide further evidence for differentiating different hands, or different writing sessions, or assigning different parts of a manuscript to specific scribes. Such analysis is mostly successful when dealing with iron-gall ink, which contains a number of metallic elements (Fe, Cu, Zn, Pb etc…) in varying/different proportions, allowing reliable comparison and discrimination of ink compositions. The interpretation of the results however, has to be done in cooperation between the material scientists and paleographers (for example, several scribes may share the same ink and tools on a manuscript, leading to an identical ink composition despite different hands; the opposite, with different ink compositions but one hand can also happen, if a manuscript was written in different sessions).