Abstract:This essay examines Marco Polo's Description of the World as a central node in the library of King Charles V of France (r. 1364–1380). It first discusses the generations-long attachment that the Valois exhibited for the Description, which in effect became a dynastic heirloom. It then surveys the origins of Charles V's book collection, which expanded on an existing library that already contained several works that discussed the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Far East. As we know from the inventories of 1380, Charles V owned five copies of the Description, which was emblematic of the king's intellectual project. In its geographical reach and breadth of content, the Description mirrors the rest of the library. Many of the genres and works that influenced Marco Polo and Rustichello da Pisa–epics, romances, chronicles–were housed in Charles's library. The library also contained two of the most important works of European geography–The Book of John Mandeville and the Catalan Atlas–both of which were inspired by and draw on the Description. As the definitive European account on the Mongols, the Description is also related to the roughly forty volumes in Charles's library that contained mentions of the "Tartars." A third, if not much more, of the works in the library either came from Asia (e.g. astrological treatises), or described Asian and African peoples and places. The Description thus invites us to understand Charles V's library as not only a European but rather a global collection.
{"title":"Marco Polo's Devisement du monde (Description of the World) in the Library of King Charles V of France","authors":"M. Cruse","doi":"10.1353/dph.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dph.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines Marco Polo's Description of the World as a central node in the library of King Charles V of France (r. 1364–1380). It first discusses the generations-long attachment that the Valois exhibited for the Description, which in effect became a dynastic heirloom. It then surveys the origins of Charles V's book collection, which expanded on an existing library that already contained several works that discussed the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Far East. As we know from the inventories of 1380, Charles V owned five copies of the Description, which was emblematic of the king's intellectual project. In its geographical reach and breadth of content, the Description mirrors the rest of the library. Many of the genres and works that influenced Marco Polo and Rustichello da Pisa–epics, romances, chronicles–were housed in Charles's library. The library also contained two of the most important works of European geography–The Book of John Mandeville and the Catalan Atlas–both of which were inspired by and draw on the Description. As the definitive European account on the Mongols, the Description is also related to the roughly forty volumes in Charles's library that contained mentions of the \"Tartars.\" A third, if not much more, of the works in the library either came from Asia (e.g. astrological treatises), or described Asian and African peoples and places. The Description thus invites us to understand Charles V's library as not only a European but rather a global collection.","PeriodicalId":387346,"journal":{"name":"Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129986011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The first evident connections between Marco Polo and members of the Dominican order were made when he began traveling to the East with his father, his uncle, and two Dominicans who rapidly turned back. Despite this unlucky episode, the Dominicans have played an important role in the diffusion and reception of the Divisament dou monde (i.e., the Book of Marco Polo). The Latin translation made by the friar Francesco Pipino of Bologna became the most disseminated version of the book and the first Latin version to be printed. We can deduce that another version is also of Dominican origin. Archival documents attest to links between Marco Polo and the Venetian Dominicans. Members of the Order of the Preachers, who quickly manifested a strong interest in the book, are also responsible for circulating the text in their preaching and teaching, not only across Italy but also in France and England. This essay highlights the connections among Marco Polo, his book, and the Dominicans by combining approaches based on codicology, diplomatics, history, philology, religion, and art history.
{"title":"Marco Polo, the Book, and the Dominicans","authors":"Christine Gadrat-Ouerfelli","doi":"10.1353/dph.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dph.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The first evident connections between Marco Polo and members of the Dominican order were made when he began traveling to the East with his father, his uncle, and two Dominicans who rapidly turned back. Despite this unlucky episode, the Dominicans have played an important role in the diffusion and reception of the Divisament dou monde (i.e., the Book of Marco Polo). The Latin translation made by the friar Francesco Pipino of Bologna became the most disseminated version of the book and the first Latin version to be printed. We can deduce that another version is also of Dominican origin. Archival documents attest to links between Marco Polo and the Venetian Dominicans. Members of the Order of the Preachers, who quickly manifested a strong interest in the book, are also responsible for circulating the text in their preaching and teaching, not only across Italy but also in France and England. This essay highlights the connections among Marco Polo, his book, and the Dominicans by combining approaches based on codicology, diplomatics, history, philology, religion, and art history.","PeriodicalId":387346,"journal":{"name":"Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129688371","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Medieval and Early Modern Reception of Marco Polo's Description of the World: An Introduction","authors":"M. Cruse","doi":"10.1353/dph.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dph.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":387346,"journal":{"name":"Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures","volume":"83 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122186605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Erotics of Grief: Emotions and the Construction of Privilege in the Medieval Mediterranean by Megan Moore (review)","authors":"Aitor Boada Benito","doi":"10.1353/dph.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dph.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":387346,"journal":{"name":"Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures","volume":"153 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123499215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In this essay we focus on one particular instance of Marco Polo's Travels in the Latin Francesco Pipino tradition, that of the long version of the "Moving Mountain" episode. All major Polo versions, Latin or vernacular, contain a short version of the episode of the "Moving Mountain," which tells the story of an exemplary Christian who is able to move a mountain due to his strong religious belief and thereby converts Muslims in the Middle East. However, half a dozen of the more than sixty manuscripts of Francesco Pipino's Latin translation of Marco Polo's Travels also contain a substantially longer version of the "Moving Mountain" episode. This long version also appears in Pipino's Chronicon, albeit in a stylistically and lexically different form, which survives in only one manuscript copy, located at the Biblioteca Estense at Modena (MS lat. 465). This essay provides a working edition of the long version of the "Moving Mountain" episode on the basis of all Pipino manuscripts containing it as well as a transcription of the episode in Pipino's Chronicon. This will serve as a basis for comparison with vernacular versions of the "Moving Mountain" such as, for example, the Franco-Italian and Venetian versions. Our microlevel parallel reading of one episode will bring to the fore major questions relating to Marco Polo research, such as the temporal sequence of the different vernacular versions and the relationship to these texts of Francesco Pipino's Latin text.
{"title":"One Translator, Two Translations: Contextualizing Marco Polo's \"Moving Mountain\" Episode in Francesco Pipino's Translation of Il Milione and in his Chronicon","authors":"M. Klarer, Hubert Alisade","doi":"10.1353/dph.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dph.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this essay we focus on one particular instance of Marco Polo's Travels in the Latin Francesco Pipino tradition, that of the long version of the \"Moving Mountain\" episode. All major Polo versions, Latin or vernacular, contain a short version of the episode of the \"Moving Mountain,\" which tells the story of an exemplary Christian who is able to move a mountain due to his strong religious belief and thereby converts Muslims in the Middle East. However, half a dozen of the more than sixty manuscripts of Francesco Pipino's Latin translation of Marco Polo's Travels also contain a substantially longer version of the \"Moving Mountain\" episode. This long version also appears in Pipino's Chronicon, albeit in a stylistically and lexically different form, which survives in only one manuscript copy, located at the Biblioteca Estense at Modena (MS lat. 465). This essay provides a working edition of the long version of the \"Moving Mountain\" episode on the basis of all Pipino manuscripts containing it as well as a transcription of the episode in Pipino's Chronicon. This will serve as a basis for comparison with vernacular versions of the \"Moving Mountain\" such as, for example, the Franco-Italian and Venetian versions. Our microlevel parallel reading of one episode will bring to the fore major questions relating to Marco Polo research, such as the temporal sequence of the different vernacular versions and the relationship to these texts of Francesco Pipino's Latin text.","PeriodicalId":387346,"journal":{"name":"Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures","volume":"93 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114414151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages by Jesús R. Velasco (review)","authors":"A. Lloret","doi":"10.1353/dph.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dph.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":387346,"journal":{"name":"Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114101171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:As European travels around the globe intensified in the Renaissance and recomposed geographical boundaries, Marco Polo's Devisement du monde aroused new interest. His descriptions of the mainland of the Far East, a region that remained largely unsurveyed by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travelers, offered vivid information to many cosmographers and cartographers who produced images of these foreign lands. The renewed attention paid to Polo's work is evidenced by its numerous incunabula and editions printed from 1477 onward that echo the diversity of the Devisement's versions in manuscript. However, the edition printed in the Novus Orbis in 1532 appears to have been the most read and to provide most of the quotations from the Devisement du monde that were later found in cosmographies, maps, and nongeographical writings such as those of Rabelais, Du Bartas, and D'Aubigné. This essay discusses the fate of this particular Latin version of the Devisement through a study of its reception in several sixteenth-century works. It highlights how the edition inherited and perpetuated compilation, as it not only relied on compilational practices but also contributed to the transmission of Marco Polo's book in relation to other travelers' texts. Study of the circulation of this version paradoxically reveals how Marco Polo's unique representations of the Far East became standard topoi in the depiction of distant lands.
{"title":"Marco Polo in the Novus Orbis: The Reception and Circulation of the Devisement du monde in the Renaissance","authors":"Lisa Pochmalicki","doi":"10.1353/dph.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dph.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:As European travels around the globe intensified in the Renaissance and recomposed geographical boundaries, Marco Polo's Devisement du monde aroused new interest. His descriptions of the mainland of the Far East, a region that remained largely unsurveyed by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travelers, offered vivid information to many cosmographers and cartographers who produced images of these foreign lands. The renewed attention paid to Polo's work is evidenced by its numerous incunabula and editions printed from 1477 onward that echo the diversity of the Devisement's versions in manuscript. However, the edition printed in the Novus Orbis in 1532 appears to have been the most read and to provide most of the quotations from the Devisement du monde that were later found in cosmographies, maps, and nongeographical writings such as those of Rabelais, Du Bartas, and D'Aubigné. This essay discusses the fate of this particular Latin version of the Devisement through a study of its reception in several sixteenth-century works. It highlights how the edition inherited and perpetuated compilation, as it not only relied on compilational practices but also contributed to the transmission of Marco Polo's book in relation to other travelers' texts. Study of the circulation of this version paradoxically reveals how Marco Polo's unique representations of the Far East became standard topoi in the depiction of distant lands.","PeriodicalId":387346,"journal":{"name":"Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128461643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. Sargan, Jessica Lockhart, A. J. Nelson, D. Meert-Williston, Alexandra Gillespie
Abstract:This essay describes the results of a new application of micro-computed X-ray tomography (µCT) to conduct nondestructive investigations of the binding structures of premodern books. This application addresses a twofold challenge in the study of historic bindings and their construction. Few premodern books survive in their original bindings. Moreover, until recently, when books were rebound, the original structures were rarely documented, and the remains were usually discarded. Where original bindings do remain in situ, much of their structure is, by design, hidden. Particulars of construction may be surmised; but without destructive disbinding, little can be proven. µCT enables an exploratory, multilinear approach to codicological investigations that makes bindings accessible in the form of tractable volumetric data.
{"title":"The Ghosts of Bindings Past: Micro-Computed X-Ray Tomography for the Study of Bookbinding","authors":"J. Sargan, Jessica Lockhart, A. J. Nelson, D. Meert-Williston, Alexandra Gillespie","doi":"10.1353/dph.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dph.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay describes the results of a new application of micro-computed X-ray tomography (µCT) to conduct nondestructive investigations of the binding structures of premodern books. This application addresses a twofold challenge in the study of historic bindings and their construction. Few premodern books survive in their original bindings. Moreover, until recently, when books were rebound, the original structures were rarely documented, and the remains were usually discarded. Where original bindings do remain in situ, much of their structure is, by design, hidden. Particulars of construction may be surmised; but without destructive disbinding, little can be proven. µCT enables an exploratory, multilinear approach to codicological investigations that makes bindings accessible in the form of tractable volumetric data.","PeriodicalId":387346,"journal":{"name":"Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121420066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:A number of powerful readers have explored the self-referential structure of Froissart's Voyage en Béarn, a book about its own author, a chronicler who is also a poet, who reads a book, his Méliador, at the court of the count of Foix, a place whose sinister history may perhaps be explained by reference to yet another book, Ovid's Metamorphoses. Each midnight, in a blaze of torches, Froissart reads to the count from the Méliador, the story of the chevalier du soleil, so that the solar associations of the count's chosen sobriquet, Fébus, become a crucial part of the literary structure. Yet, as has long been recognized, Froissart never gives the count this name. The text also seems radically incomplete when Froissart accepts unquestioningly an incoherent explanation of a talking bear and a curse that has fallen on the count's half-brother, justifying the idea that a bear might talk by a blatant misreading of Ovid's story of Actaeon. Actaeon, who cannot speak after his transformation and so is killed by his hounds, can be taken, as he was by Ovid, as a figure of the censored writer. One possible approach to these omissions and inconsistencies is to consider the Voyage en Béarn not as a literary work that is fully controlled by Froissart but as a multiauthored cultural construct, or what in the Middle Ages was sometimes called a matter. Froissart's witnesses, historical agents, sought to shape his account, and he resisted. Another approach is to read the Voyage en Béarn as a sustained anacoluthon, in which the associations of the suppressed alternative, Fébus, infiltrate the version Froissart actually wrote. In both cases, Froissart's text takes shape around what it cannot or will not say. The Voyage en Béarn alludes not just to its own writing but also to its own self-censorship.
摘要:许多有影响力的读者探索了弗罗伊萨特的《bassaarn之旅》的自我参照结构，这本书讲述了自己的作者，一位编年史家兼诗人，他在福瓦伯爵的宫廷里读了一本书，他的massaliador，这个地方的邪恶历史也许可以参考另一本书来解释，奥维德的《变形记》。每天午夜，在熊熊的火把下，弗罗伊萨特从《太阳骑士报》上给伯爵朗读太阳骑士的故事。因此，伯爵选择的绰号“太阳骑士报”与太阳的联系，就成了文学结构的重要组成部分。然而，正如人们早就认识到的那样，Froissart从未给伯爵起过这个名字。当弗罗伊萨特毫无疑问地接受了一个关于一只会说话的熊和一个落在伯爵同父异母兄弟身上的诅咒的不连贯的解释时，这篇文章似乎也完全不完整，他通过公然误读奥维德关于阿克托翁的故事来证明熊可能会说话的观点是正确的。阿克托翁在变形后不能说话，因此被他的猎犬杀死，就像奥维德一样，他被看作是一个被审查的作家。对这些遗漏和不一致的一种可能的方法是，把《bassaarn之旅》看作是一个多作者的文化结构，而不是一部完全由Froissart控制的文学作品，或者在中世纪有时被称为一件事。Froissart的目击者，历史代理人，试图塑造他的叙述，他拒绝了。另一种方法是将《渡海记》解读为一种持续的分析，在这种分析中，被压制的另一种渡海记，即渡海记，渗透到弗罗伊萨特实际写的版本中。在这两种情况下，Froissart的文本都围绕着它不能或不愿说的内容形成。The Voyage en bassarn不仅暗示了它自己的写作，也暗示了它自己的自我审查。
{"title":"Froissart and the Matter of the Béarn","authors":"Andrew Taylor","doi":"10.1353/dph.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dph.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:A number of powerful readers have explored the self-referential structure of Froissart's Voyage en Béarn, a book about its own author, a chronicler who is also a poet, who reads a book, his Méliador, at the court of the count of Foix, a place whose sinister history may perhaps be explained by reference to yet another book, Ovid's Metamorphoses. Each midnight, in a blaze of torches, Froissart reads to the count from the Méliador, the story of the chevalier du soleil, so that the solar associations of the count's chosen sobriquet, Fébus, become a crucial part of the literary structure. Yet, as has long been recognized, Froissart never gives the count this name. The text also seems radically incomplete when Froissart accepts unquestioningly an incoherent explanation of a talking bear and a curse that has fallen on the count's half-brother, justifying the idea that a bear might talk by a blatant misreading of Ovid's story of Actaeon. Actaeon, who cannot speak after his transformation and so is killed by his hounds, can be taken, as he was by Ovid, as a figure of the censored writer. One possible approach to these omissions and inconsistencies is to consider the Voyage en Béarn not as a literary work that is fully controlled by Froissart but as a multiauthored cultural construct, or what in the Middle Ages was sometimes called a matter. Froissart's witnesses, historical agents, sought to shape his account, and he resisted. Another approach is to read the Voyage en Béarn as a sustained anacoluthon, in which the associations of the suppressed alternative, Fébus, infiltrate the version Froissart actually wrote. In both cases, Froissart's text takes shape around what it cannot or will not say. The Voyage en Béarn alludes not just to its own writing but also to its own self-censorship.","PeriodicalId":387346,"journal":{"name":"Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115773313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay will discuss an ongoing project to train an optical character recognition (OCR) system on medieval manuscripts—specifically, the OCR engine Kraken, which we trained to transcribe early-fifteenth-century Middle English manuscripts. Our current model, trained on Scribe D's handwriting, has a 97 percent training accuracy rate and transcribes unseen manuscripts with a range of accuracy rates between 27 and 86 percent. Our project adds to the growing number of successful experiments in training medieval manuscripts on OCR, a technology that could have an immense impact on medieval studies.The primary concern of this essay is not our specific results but the challenges we faced when preparing our training data and the decisions we made accordingly. In particular, we compare the diplomatic transcriptions required by our software to the semi-diplomatic transcriptions that medievalists usually create. We argue that technical constraints such as the use of diplomatic transcriptions in OCR might encourage medievalists to evaluate how we typically remediate manuscripts (that is, transfer them from one medium to another). Considering the potential scope and scalability of this technology, we argue that it is important to consider our training data (human-made transcriptions) carefully, as is the case for any machinelearning project. But we also argue that machine learning offers a useful framework for understanding how we manipulate manuscript data in any kind of remediation.
{"title":"Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Medieval Manuscripts: Reconsidering Transcriptions in the Digital Age","authors":"Jenna Schoen, G. E. Saretto","doi":"10.1353/dph.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dph.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay will discuss an ongoing project to train an optical character recognition (OCR) system on medieval manuscripts—specifically, the OCR engine Kraken, which we trained to transcribe early-fifteenth-century Middle English manuscripts. Our current model, trained on Scribe D's handwriting, has a 97 percent training accuracy rate and transcribes unseen manuscripts with a range of accuracy rates between 27 and 86 percent. Our project adds to the growing number of successful experiments in training medieval manuscripts on OCR, a technology that could have an immense impact on medieval studies.The primary concern of this essay is not our specific results but the challenges we faced when preparing our training data and the decisions we made accordingly. In particular, we compare the diplomatic transcriptions required by our software to the semi-diplomatic transcriptions that medievalists usually create. We argue that technical constraints such as the use of diplomatic transcriptions in OCR might encourage medievalists to evaluate how we typically remediate manuscripts (that is, transfer them from one medium to another). Considering the potential scope and scalability of this technology, we argue that it is important to consider our training data (human-made transcriptions) carefully, as is the case for any machinelearning project. But we also argue that machine learning offers a useful framework for understanding how we manipulate manuscript data in any kind of remediation.","PeriodicalId":387346,"journal":{"name":"Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125651039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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