A Character Style Library for Syriac Manuscripts

Authors

Nicholas Howe, Smith CollegeFollow
Alice Yang, Smith College
Michael Penn, Mount Holyoke College

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

8-2015

Publication Title

Proceedings of the International Workshop on Historical Image Processing

Abstract

Paleographers study ancient and historical handwriting in order to learn more about documents of significant interest and their creators. Computational tools and methods can aid this task in numerous ways, particularly for languages and scripts that are not widely known today. One project currently underway seeks to gather a collection of securely dated letter samples from Syriac documents dating between 500 and 1100 CE. The set comprises over 60,000 human selected character samples. This paper gives details on the collection and describes the automatic techniques used to process the initial human input so as to produce high-quality segmented character samples ready for analysis.

Keywords

Syriac, historical manuscripts, handwriting style

Rights

© ACM

Comments

CCS Concepts •Applied computing → Digital libraries and archives; Arts and humanities

Recommended Citation

Howe, Nicholas; Yang, Alice; and Penn, Michael, "A Character Style Library for Syriac Manuscripts" (2015). Computer Science: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/csc_facpubs/130