New Publication: 'Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits'
A new publication by computer scientists and palaeographers is now out. Resulting from the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop on 'Computation and Palaeography - Potentials and Limits' which took place last September, I found this to be an unusually productive meeting of the two disciplines, in which I think both sides genuinely listened to and learned from each other. In fact, several publications are forthcoming from this: a short summary in Informatik Spektrum, the 'manifesto' (which is really more of a statement of current and future research directions), and this newly-published report which contains abstracts of the papers delivered at the workshop and summaries of the working groups' conclusions.
Quoting the abstract,
This report documents the program and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12382 'Perspectives Workshop: Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits'. The workshop focused on the interaction of palaeography, the study of ancient and medieval documents, with computerized tools, particularly those developed for analysis of digital images and text mining. The goal of this marriage of disciplines is to provide efficient solutions to time and labor consuming palaeographic tasks. It furthermore attempts to provide scholars with quantitative evidence to palaeographical arguments, consequently facilitating a better understanding of our cultural heritage through the unique perspective of ancient and medieval documents. The workshop provided a vital opportunity for palaeographers to interact and discuss the potential of digital methods with computer scientists specializing in machine vision and statistical data analysis. This was essential not only in suggesting new directions and ideas for improving palaeographic research, but also in identifying questions which scholars working individually, in their respective fields, would not have asked without directly communicating with colleagues from outside their research community.
The citation, including a link to the full text which is freely available online, is as follows:
T. Hassner, M. Rehbein, P.A. Stokes and L. Wolf (eds), 'Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits (Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 12382)', Dagstuhl Reports 2:9 (2012): 184–199. doi:10.4230/DagRep.2.9.184
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