Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

139
comment illustrates, while there are many specialized discipl<strong>in</strong>es with<strong>in</strong> classics, they also share many
research methods. This section therefore explores some recent state-of-the-art work <strong>in</strong> digital
palaeography.
In a recent paper, Peter Stokes (Stokes 2009) has provided an overview of the issues faced <strong>in</strong>
attempt<strong>in</strong>g to create a discipl<strong>in</strong>e of digital palaeography. He observed that traditional palaeographic
studies have their own methodological issues, <strong>in</strong> particular a lack of established term<strong>in</strong>ology (e.g., for
handwrit<strong>in</strong>g), a factor that has made those few digital resources that have been created difficult to use
and “almost impossible to <strong>in</strong>terconnect.” This has not only frustrated scholarly communication but also
made creat<strong>in</strong>g “databases of scripts” almost impossible. Nonetheless, extensive digital corpora are now
available, and Stokes argued that such corpora could not be analyzed by traditional methods because
they can <strong>in</strong>clude “hundreds of scribal hands with potentially thousands or tens of thousands of
features.” The creation of new databases and the use of data m<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g, Stokes asserted, would be
necessary to work with such large bodies of material. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that digital
methods had still received little acceptance from scholars <strong>in</strong> the discipl<strong>in</strong>e:
However, promis<strong>in</strong>g as these seem, they have received almost no acceptance and relatively
little <strong>in</strong>terest from ‘traditional’ palaeographers. This is partly because the technology is not yet
mature, and perhaps also because the attempts to date have generally <strong>in</strong>volved small projects
without the susta<strong>in</strong>ed fund<strong>in</strong>g or larger <strong>in</strong>terdiscipl<strong>in</strong>ary groups that digital humanities often
require (Stokes 2009).
In addition to the challenges of relatively new and untested technology, limited fund<strong>in</strong>g, and small
projects, Stokes expressed how the use of digital methods is problematic because it requires
understand<strong>in</strong>g of many fields, such as computer graphics and probability theory, skill areas that most
traditional palaeographers cannot be expected to have.
One potential solution, Stokes believed, was to develop software that presented results <strong>in</strong> an <strong>in</strong>telligible
manner to palaeographers. Consequently, Stokes is work<strong>in</strong>g on a software platform for image
enhancement called the “Framework for Image Analysis,” a “modular and extendible software <strong>in</strong> Java
for the analysis of scribal hands.” This software allows users to load images of handwrit<strong>in</strong>g and run
various automated processes to analyze and generate metrics for scribal hands. The system <strong>in</strong>cludes a
module to enhance images before they are processed that can also be run as a stand-alone application
to try to recover damaged text from manuscripts. One useful feature of this system is that users can
compare various metrics and distances generated by different processes (implemented as plug-<strong>in</strong>s) on
different pieces of writ<strong>in</strong>g, implement their own algorithms, and export the results of these processes.
As Stokes noted, this type of system “allows people to compare different techniques <strong>in</strong> a common
framework, produc<strong>in</strong>g libraries of scribal hands and plug-<strong>in</strong>s as a common and documented basis for
palaeographical study” (Stokes 2009). The ability to create results that could be either “reproducible or
at least verifiable” was also important, although Stokes believed that issues of documentation and
reproducibility were manageable <strong>in</strong> that software could be designed to record all actions that are
performed and save them <strong>in</strong> a standard format.
Thus, Stokes highlighted the need for common frameworks for analysis, the use of standards, and
reproducible results to build the foundations for digital palaeography. One other valuable po<strong>in</strong>t he
made was that designers of digital humanities applications needed not just to consider what algorithms
to implement but to how present those results <strong>in</strong> an <strong>in</strong>telligible manner to non-computer scientists:
“Indeed, it is an important question how the results of complex algorithms can best be presented to