All right, well, I'm going to now, in a sense, pick up from what Leo was talking about, but
go in a different direction.
The data that he was looking at, those descriptors and so on, were, as he mentioned, based on
work he did several years ago.
And one of the other things that we're doing with this material now is coming back and
looking at the ways in which we've been describing handwriting and trying to be a lot more rigorous
in terms of developing a model about that.
So this is what I'm going to talk about now, and it's going to pick up a theme that I've
discussed several times before, including at DH 2009, and that underlies a lot of the
work in digital approaches to paleography, including the ones that Leo mentioned, namely
this problem of evidence and how to present it in clear and convincing ways.
Now, if you look through the literature on digital methods to paleography, apart from
some of the things that we've seen today and some of the more recent ones, a lot of
it has been about identifying scribal hands, were these written by the same person or not.
That's certainly very important, but it's not really what I'm interested in.
I'm much more interested in development of script, script history, how things are changing
at different times and places and so on.
This is something that I think it's fair to say most digital approaches are only just
beginning to address, but they're very much the same underlying questions of evidence
and how to communicate this.
So just to give one example, and I don't mean to pick on this particular scholar because
it's absolutely typical of the field, but it does illustrate the problem, I think, where
we have this direct quotation, the regular use of a form of tea in which the letter is
concluded by turning the final stroke back down to or below the baseline is a normal
feature of 9th century English and Welsh script, end of sentence.
And although he doesn't state it explicitly, what this author clearly means is that this
is a feature exclusive of 9th century English script.
In fact, in other publications, he goes on to date manuscripts on the basis of this particular
feature.
Now, actually, I'm pretty certain he's right, but unfortunately, that's it.
That's the entire argument he presents for this dating feature, and so it's probably
no surprise that just about everyone has ignored this completely because there's no
evidence to back it up.
But it's a problem.
How can you test an assertion like that?
It takes years to go through libraries and look at all this material and pull it all
together and see if it's valid or not.
And how would you present this sort of material anyway?
Well, this is one of the key goals of the DigiPal project, which is sort of in the background
of everything I'm going to be talking about now, namely this question of how to find a
way to present paleographical arguments in ways that paleographers can understand and
trust.
And again, Leo mentioned some of this earlier, but it's a crucial question to me, and I think
actually for DH in general, if the people in the core disciplines can't understand and
trust this material, then to a large extent, we're wasting our time, I think.
So how do we go about this?
Well, in theory, with digital methods, it's relatively easy, right?
We can create a database in which we have all the Ts and date them and so on and so
forth, and then if you have a hypothesis like this, you can go in and test and see if this
works or not based on the evidence.
And people have tried to do this.
There are some examples that are out there now.
The problem, though, amongst other things, is that if you're going to do this, you need
to be able to describe the handwriting.
And that turns out to be much more difficult than we initially thought.
So very quickly, to give you an idea of what we're talking about, what these things look
like, this is a sample of handwriting from the core period that we're looking at in this
project, the 11th century.
It's a charter written, well, it's dated to 1018 AD, and it's almost exactly 1,000 years
old.
It was written by a known scribe, somebody we've identified in other manuscripts, and
it's absolutely typical of the sort of thing that we're looking at.
Now what you probably can see pretty quickly is that this same scribe is writing two different
scripts, the smaller one at the sort of top half, more or less, and this larger one down
the bottom.
What you may or may not have noticed, depending on how tuned you are, is some of the finer
details.
For example, in the top section, not only is it smaller, but the A's are consistently
written differently from the A's in the bottom section.
This is very deliberate, and it's not distinctive of this person.
It's common across many scribes of this period.
The S's as well on the right, you can see up the top, we have this long form of S as
opposed to the one that's standing on the line and going up.
And in the middle, the ascenders, these parts that come up, you can see the different shapes
here, the triangular shape in this section compared to that split section at the top.
This is an example of the different features that Leo was discussing earlier, and these
are the sorts of things that we want to be able to find in a database as paleographers.
These relatively subtle details and other things that are much more subtle that would
be actually quite difficult to explain, which is what I'm not using in here.
So the question we've been wrestling with, that I've been wrestling with, is how can
we describe these in a rigorous way that's relatively unambiguous and relatively clear?
And in fact, if you go through the literature, what we find is that the way these questions
are phrased is in fact quite general.
They're not precise enough for building digital systems that can be searched and manipulated
and so on.
So you find things like paleographers want to know which manuscripts contain insular
vernacular forms of A. Show me all occurrences of Caroline S by scribes who otherwise wrote
vernacular minuscule, habitually wrote round A, so on and so forth.
What may not be obvious though is that here we have this idea of a letter, but that the
meaning of letter in these questions is actually quite different, but that's not reflected
in the terminology.
So I can illustrate that by actually bringing out some of these terms and discussing them.
And I'm not the first person to notice this.
Somebody relatively recently looked at forensic document analysis where people have needed
to be a lot clearer and less ambiguous than they have in paleography.
And so Tom Davis wrote a very influential article a few years ago where he referred
to this problem and started suggesting some of these terms that we can start to bring
in and use to help.
So there are obvious parallels here with phonetics, the allophone, phone, and so forth.
But he proposed allograph, ideograph, and graph, which we saw used in the previous paper.
The idea is that for a given letter, you might have different ways of writing that particular
letter, but ways that are common to a group of people, like we saw earlier, those two
different As.
These are not individual As relevant to one person.
These are As that people widely recognize.
Or we today have Roman A and Italic A. They're different ways of writing the same linguistic
form, but again, ones that we recognize.
That's general, though, across a group of people.
For an individual, we have an ideograph, not with an E, which of course is something entirely
different, but in the sense of idiosyncratic, the way that I write my particular A, and
how that is different from the way that each of you writes a different A.
So if I try to write italic A, it won't be quite the same as yours.
And there are most likely things that are consistent across all of my As that are different
from the way that you write consistently.
If that's not the case, then paleography and forensic document analysis collapses, because
then we can't identify anybody.
But then we have another form of letter, namely the physical instance, the thing on the page
in one particular case, which probably represents an ideograph, which in turn is a form of
allograft.
And so already we have these three different senses of letter.
That's helpful, but it turns out actually that even that's not enough once we start
getting into the details of describing things like the ascenders and descenders and so forth.
So as part of the project, we started introducing further definitions, and these are still very
much being debated.
And if you go to the blog site, you'll see debates about some of these.
One of the more difficult questions is, what do you call things at the top end of the hierarchy,
so to speak?
And so what we referred to as a character, perhaps, which is something that unifies allografts,
if you like.
And so the A as a miniscule A, not the same as a magiscule, capital A, but that still
groups a set of allografts, and that is getting closer to the linguistic sense.
Then we want to describe different parts of letters, so we can break it down into components.
Now one of the things that paleographers are very interested in is how scribes repeat different
strokes across different letters.
So for example, we might have the ascender as a particular component, the bit that goes
up in B, D, H, L, those sorts of letters.
And typically, ascribe, or indeed each of us, will write that component of a letter,
the ascender, in the same way for each of these letters.
Now if it's a very cursive script, there are changes, and there can be complications and
so on.
But the principle is that an ascender would be written in essentially the same way, or
an ascender, or a bowl, and so on.
And so by having this terminology, we can then start going into particular features
and describing them and looking at how they work.
And in fact, feature, this is partly what we were hearing about earlier, these descriptive
labels that can be applied to ascenders, descenders, and so on.
So an ascender might be long or short, or an ascender also might be long or short, or
might be narrow or wide, and so forth.
And if we start introducing these terminologies, then that list of questions we can now rephrase
being much more specific.
So instead of saying things like, show me all the forms of the ascenders and so on,
we can start saying, show me all graphs or ideographs for ascenders which are forked.
Or I might be interested in much more general things, so show me scripts which have many
narrow features in them, if I'm interested in aspects of style.
Or show me forks on top not only of ascenders, but on other things.
And then that's not quite enough, because this is only looking at individual letters
in isolation.
And of course, that's not the way people work or people write.
And so we can add some additional terms.
Building on those developed by Malcolm Parks in particular, a well-known paleographer,
and this terminology is widely accepted in paleography, but even that's not quite precise
enough for our purposes.
So if we reformulate these in terms of allograss and so on, then we can talk about the script
as a set of allograss and potentially also rules for their use, which I'll come back
to briefly at the end, as practiced by a group of people.
So there's two examples that I showed you earlier, that smaller script, referred to
as English vernacular miniscule, and it has these allograss, but it also has a set of
rules and conventions and so on that says when you're writing this particular script,
you use this set of allograss and you use this allograss in this context as opposed
to a different allograss in a different context.
And then on the other hand, we have the Caroline miniscule, that larger script, where we have
a different set of rules and contexts and allograss and so forth.
And so we can start to define these much more rigorously from a digital point of view.
And then by analogy with allograss and ideograph and graph, we can talk about the script, but
then a scribal practice, what one individual does and the particular rules that in this
period he, in other periods he or she might use, or the scribal hand, not just what's
happening in general, but in a particular manuscript, a sample written by a particular
scribe at a particular time in a particular script according to a particular scribal practice.
And then we can start generalizing, so we can say that English vernacular miniscule
has this set of rules.
But then this particular scribe varies from these rules in these particular ways.
And then this particular scribal hand, this piece of writing here on the page, varies
even from this particular scribe's practice according to these ways.
So to give just a few fairly quick examples of how this might work in principle, for miniscule
H, we have two different allograss, which we saw briefly.
There's the Caroline one and the Insular one, which are illustrated on the left now.
And both Caroline and Insular H have an ascender and an arch, and a bit going up and a bit
coming around.
But then we also know that we saw earlier the ascender in the Caroline one has that
triangular wedge shape, and in the Insular one it has that fork shape.
And so we can start describing these much more precisely than we've been able to earlier.
We know that vernacular miniscule normally includes Insular H, not Caroline H. A bit
of particular scribe might happen to use Caroline H within an Insular context.
Now we can start to articulate all of this.
So again, this particular individual might have a distinctive ideograph, a distinctive
way of writing H to show you how that works and what comes out of it.
So this is the proposed model, and in the book of abstracts there's a more formal UML
diagram, and we're looking at formalizing this further.
In fact, we're looking at some alloy in some of these more descriptive languages as a way
of developing this and testing it and so on.
But we've also started putting it into practice in a real context in terms of describing actual
examples, which I'll run through very, very briefly, and I'm happy to show you afterwards
in more detail.
So to give a quick rundown of the DigiPAL project itself, it's a four-year project
funded by the European Research Council.
We're about halfway through at the moment, and the focus is, as well as this modeling
and developing a framework for deploying and searching and demonstrating this material.
We also plan to put in the entire corpus of 11th-century English vernacular.
It's about 1,200 scribes, so it's relatively small in the scheme of things.
Sorry, scribal hands, I should say.
We also have some students, PhD students, one working on 12th-century protogothic from
Scandinavia and another working on Hebrew script to test if the model works for them,
and we hope to get some cuneiform material as well.
We're looking at the British Museum to work with that.
If you go to the website, you'll see more details of that, and we're still very much
developing the software, so I will show you a brief example of that, so to say there's
some links there.
So first, very quickly, this is just a screenshot of the annotation tool, where we are doing
everything manually.
We haven't yet found sufficiently good image processing, although we're open to the possibility.
So you draw a box around your A, you tell the system that this is this particular scribal
hand and that it's an insular A, and then the system knows already that an insular A
will normally have these components and features and so on, and so you can go in and then say
which ones do or don't apply to this particular context.
Once you have that, of course, then you can start manipulating and searching and so on.
I'm going to play with fire here and see if this runs as a live demonstration, but just
very quickly, and then I'll go back to screenshots for reasons of time.
But one of the, an interesting research question that we've been looking at is the royal scribes
and how they write, because there is a hypothesis in the literature that the royal scribes in
particular write Caroline script in a very consistent way, but that the vernacular is
much more chaotic and less regular.
And now for the first time, really, we can start to test this.
So we do our search of all the scribes in royal charters, and we can go in and let's
say we're interested in Caroline A, so we want the character is A, allograft is Caroline,
we do our search, and then this dynamically pulls up all these images of Caroline A, and
we can click on those and it will take us to the full page with the different context
and so on there, so we can see how it fits in.
Again, I'm rushing a bit, but I'm happy to demonstrate that later.
And already, we can see that actually, even though these are from the royal script and
they're all roughly the same period, in fact, the A's vary quite significantly from one
to the other.
So already, we might start to wonder, is this really valid hypothesis or not?
What about Caroline script more generally?
Well, let's remove the character and just look for Caroline allografts.
Well, that's fine, we can start to pull out these forms and compare them across each other.
And to see, are they actually consistent or not?
And again, we can see quite a bit of variation.
Again, I'm showing you quickly, but you can come back and look at this in more detail.
Because I'm rushing through, I'll come back and show you some screenshots just to speed
things up.
So we've looked at the royal scribes and how they write Caroline, but what about a particular
individual?
If the hypothesis is that the vernacular and the Caroline are being written with similar
consistency, then we might want to look at a particular scribe and see how he writes
in this case.
Well, we can do that again.
Let's take letter M, which is consistent, it's written in the same way in terms of features
and so on, across the insular and the Caroline, and we can pull that out.
So now we're searching for the scribe and for the allograft, but not for a particular
... sorry, that is actually the character, but not for particular allografts.
At the top we have the Caroline ones, and beneath that the insular ones, and in fact
they look identical, I would argue.
There's very little variation between the two.
So again, we can start to see that by presenting evidence in this way, rather than as a statement,
I hope this is a bit more convincing.
Now it's just a very small sample.
It doesn't prove anything yet, of course, and we have two more years to enter more of
this data.
But there's a different way of manipulating and searching and testing hypotheses, and
I think we can get a lot further.
Another example, what about scribes within a particular manuscript?
How much do these scribes sitting next to each other, working alongside each other?
How much does their writing vary from one to another?
So now we're looking for graphs, these images from a particular manuscript and from a particular
stint, from the same date and so forth, and we can see quite a bit of variation.
Which goes back to Lior's paper earlier, where he was talking about this ash and how it's
very distinctive of individual scribal hands.
Well here, again, we can see images as another way of communicating that, arguably a way
that paleographers could understand much more effectively.
Or we can say, okay, I'm interested in the length of ascenders, which has been hypothesized
that the length of the ascender varies in different dates throughout the 11th century.
So let's search for components this time, not for features or allographs, and search
for all the scripts, all the letters, all the graphs with ascenders in them.
And now we can start to see how this lays out.
And we can continue.
What about the long ascenders, the short ascenders, and then plot those on timelines, on maps,
so on and so forth.
You get the idea.
Once this model is in place, it suddenly opens up all these new ways of searching visualization
and manipulation that haven't been possible for, and that allow testing of these hypotheses
this sort of exploration of paleographical research questions in ways that we haven't
seen to date.
In very briefly, just to round up, what is missing?
Well, as, again, Leo mentioned, it is following this morphological approach, which in a sense
is Albert Dergle and the German school, I can go into that in more detail.
The paleographical theory does state that there are at least three aspects to script,
three different things to describe.
So there are other shapes, but there's also the duktas, what about the letters and how
they fit, the strokes rather, and how they fit together.
Or the context.
I mentioned context, the rules and so on.
There's a little bit of that in this system, but not rigorously.
It's not yet in the model.
And Dominique Stutzmann in particular in Paris is very interested in that and has been working
on that aspect of it.
Unfortunately, duktas is extremely difficult to capture in digital form, but there are
some things.
Melissa Terras looked at that in the Downs and Accroses, I think it is, an article in
some of the Chinese script descriptions have also looked at that.
So we can extend the model an awful lot, but even at this point we're already starting
to come up with results that are challenging real research questions already and that have
already got people interested.
And once we start applying those to Hebrew and Scandinavian and so on, then I hope that
we can really start to move somewhere on this problem of describing scripts, which to a
large extent has reached a stalemate after nearly a century or more of paleographical
debate.
Thank you very much.