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CSMC
CSMCCentre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures

Publications

The CSMC offers a wide range of publications, most of them available open access, including traditional academic outlets such as the ‘Studies in Manuscript Cultures’ book series, online resources such as the Written Artefact Profiling Guide, and software tools. A complete list of our publications is available here:

Complete list of CSMC publications
Publications

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Content

Book Series: Studies in Manuscript Cultures

Studies in Manuscript Cultures is a series of monographs and collective volumes studying handwritten artefacts. It publishes research from disciplines such as art history, codicology, computer vision, epigraphy, history, material analysis, palaeography, and philology.

SMCSMC 43

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Journal: manuscript cultures

manuscript cultures is the peer-reviewed, open access journal of the CSMC that aims at presenting new approaches to the study of written artefacts that benefit from the insights offered by the humanities, natural sciences, and computer science.

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Software

We have developed multiple Pattern Analysis Software Tools (PAST) for the automatic analysis of visual and tabular patterns in the research data from the study of ancient written artefacts. They help scholars benefit from the rapid advancements in the fields of pattern analysis and artificial intelligence. All tools are available open access.

HAT3

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Handwriting Analysis Tool

A software tool to analyse handwriting styles. Multiple and different handwriting styles can be analysed concurrently and sorted according to their similarity to a questioned or unknown style. A similarity score can be calculated for each predefined style to create a relative comparison between them with respect to an unknown style.

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VDP

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Visual-Pattern Detector

An efficient software tool for pattern detection that can be used to recognise and allocate visual patterns (such as words, drawings, and seals) automatically in digitised manuscripts. The recall-precision balance of detected patterns can be controlled visually, and the detected patterns can be saved as annotations on the original images.

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ScriptSight

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ScriptSight

A software tool to explore and sort collections of document-page images using their AI-generated ‘computational visual catalogues’. Multiple visual attributes, such as text orientation, used writing implements (pencil versus ink), and text colour, can be filtered concurrently to isolate pages matching the specified criteria.

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LDT

Photo: H. Mohammed

Line Detection Tool

The main goal of the LDT is to analyse images of writing supports in order to detect lines (such as sieve imprints or papyri fibres) and estimate their density. These detected lines form a pattern, which can be used as a distinctive feature of the writing support.

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TLC

Photo: H. Mohammed

Text-Lines Counter

The main goal of this software tool is to detect, count and mark the text lines in images of handwritten manuscripts. This version contains features to detect vertical text-lines and bright text-lines on darker background.

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XRF-DAT

Photo: H. Mohammed

X-ray Fluorescence Data Analysis Tool

The main goal of the XRF-DAT is to analyse tabular data generated by X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy in order to ease and speed up the processing and evaluation of data obtained when analysing written artefacts; in particular their inks, pigments and writing supports.

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AFAT

Photo: H. Mohammed

Artefact-Features Analysis Tool

The main goal of AFAT is to calculate statistical information from manually generated tabular data which consists of distinctive features of artefacts. The value of each feature in these tables is represented by a positive integer, which describes the particular variant of this feature in an artefact.

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V-SAT

Photo: H. Mohammed

Visual Similarity Annotation Tool

V-SAT is designed to streamline the organisation of image collections. Once organised, the software enables users to export their curated collections. The main goal of this tool is to enable experts to create training datasets for similarity-based models such as siamese networks and supervised clustering.

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Resources

Artefact Profiling Guide

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Written Artefact Profiling Guide

The Artefact Profiling Guide is a unique resource for researchers in the humanities who want to harness the potential of cutting-edge analytical methods for their work.

Access the Guide