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

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should segment the text <strong>in</strong>to blocks—which may be smaller than words—while recogniz<strong>in</strong>g
(Edwards et al. 2004).
In their model, Edwards and colleagues chose not to model word to word transition probabilities s<strong>in</strong>ce
word order <strong>in</strong> Lat<strong>in</strong> is highly arbitrary. The method had reasonable accuracy: 75 percent of the letters
were correctly transcribed and the search<strong>in</strong>g ability was reported to be relatively strong.
Some research with document analysis of Lat<strong>in</strong> manuscripts has focused on assist<strong>in</strong>g palaeographers.
The discipl<strong>in</strong>e of palaeography is explored further <strong>in</strong> its subsection, but <strong>in</strong> general, palaeography
studies the writ<strong>in</strong>g style of ancient documents. 53 Moalla et al. (2006) conducted automatic analysis of
the writ<strong>in</strong>g styles of ancient Lat<strong>in</strong> manuscripts from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries and focused
on the extraction of “sufficiently discrim<strong>in</strong>ative features” to be able to differentiate between
sufficiently large numbers of Lat<strong>in</strong> writ<strong>in</strong>gs. A number of problems complicated their image analysis,
<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the complexity of the shapes of letters, hybrid writ<strong>in</strong>g styles, poor manuscript quality,
overlapp<strong>in</strong>g l<strong>in</strong>es and words, and poor-quality manuscript images. Their discrim<strong>in</strong>ant analysis of 15
Lat<strong>in</strong> classes achieved a classification-accuracy rate of only 59 percent <strong>in</strong> their first iteration, but the
elim<strong>in</strong>ation of four classes that were not statistically well-represented <strong>in</strong>creased the rate to 81 percent.
Another key area of technology research is the development of techniques for digitiz<strong>in</strong>g and search<strong>in</strong>g
<strong>in</strong>cunabula, or early pr<strong>in</strong>ted books, a large number of which were pr<strong>in</strong>ted <strong>in</strong> Lat<strong>in</strong>. One major project
<strong>in</strong> this area is CAMENA—Lat<strong>in</strong> Texts of Early Modern Europe, 54 hosted by the University of
Mannheim. Their digital library <strong>in</strong>cludes five collections: a collection of Neo-Lat<strong>in</strong> poetry composed
by German authors available as images and mach<strong>in</strong>e-readable texts; a collection of Lat<strong>in</strong> historical and
political writ<strong>in</strong>g from early modern Germany; a reference collection of dictionaries and handbooks
from 1500–1750 that helps provide a read<strong>in</strong>g environment; a corpus of Lat<strong>in</strong> letters written by German
scholars between 1530 and 1770; and a collection of early pr<strong>in</strong>ted editions of Italian Renaissance
humanists born before 1500. This project also <strong>in</strong>cludes the Term<strong>in</strong>i and Lemmata databases, which are
now part of the eAQUA Project. The wealth of Neo-Lat<strong>in</strong> materials onl<strong>in</strong>e is well documented by the
“Philological Museum: An Analytic Bibliography of On-L<strong>in</strong>e Neo Lat<strong>in</strong> Texts,” 55 an extensive
website created by Dana F. Sutton of the University of California, Irv<strong>in</strong>e, that s<strong>in</strong>ce 1999 has served as
an “analytic bibliography of Lat<strong>in</strong> texts written dur<strong>in</strong>g the Renaissance and later that are freely
available to the general public on the Web” and <strong>in</strong>cludes more than 33,960 records.
Digitiz<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>cunabula, or books pr<strong>in</strong>ted before 1500, poses a number of challenges, as outl<strong>in</strong>ed by
Schibel and Rydberg-Cox (2006) and Rydberg-Cox (2009). As they expla<strong>in</strong>ed:
The primary challenges arise from the use of nonstandard typographical glyphs based on
medieval handwrit<strong>in</strong>g to abbreviate words. Further difficulties are posed by the practice of
<strong>in</strong>consistently mark<strong>in</strong>g word breaks at the end of l<strong>in</strong>es and of reduc<strong>in</strong>g or even elim<strong>in</strong>at<strong>in</strong>g
spac<strong>in</strong>g between some words (Rydberg-Cox 2009).
In addition, such digitized texts are often presented to a modern audience only after an extensive
amount of edit<strong>in</strong>g and annotation has occurred, a level of edit<strong>in</strong>g that is not scalable to million-book
libraries.
53 An excellent resource for explor<strong>in</strong>g ancient writ<strong>in</strong>g systems is Mnamon: Ancient Writ<strong>in</strong>g Systems <strong>in</strong> the Mediterranean
(http://lila.sns.it/mnamon/<strong>in</strong>dex.phppage=Home&lang=en), which not only provides extensive descriptions on various writ<strong>in</strong>g systems but also <strong>in</strong>cludes
selected electronic resources.
54 http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/camenahtdocs/camena.html
55 http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/bibliography/