DigiPal ‘Highly obscure’ says Times Higher Education
In his cover story piece ‘Surfdom’ in the Times Higher Education Supplement (8-14 December 2011), Matthew Reisz investigates the field of Digital Humanities and points to what he sees as the revolution created by researchers in this burgeoning field. ‘Ancient inscriptions … 
Describing Handwriting, Part V: English Vernacular Minuscule
In the previous posts, I have been outlining a model for describing handwriting. As promised earlier, I now want to outline how this may work in practice. To do this, I wish to provide a first draft of a complete …
Describing Handwriting, Part IV: Recapitulation and Formal Model
In the previous post, I promised to give more concrete examples of how this system might work in practice. Before doing so, however, I first want to recap a bit and try to formalise the discussion so far. I was …
Describing Handwriting, Part III: Hands and Graphs
Part I of this series focussed entirely on representing scripts, that is, the ideal in the scribe’s mind. Part II introduced the idea of the idiograph and hinted at some issues not properly addressed in Part I, revealing (for instance) …
Describing Handwriting, Part II: Terminology
Continuing from Part I of this series on describing handwriting, we have outlined a ‘high-level’ conceptual system for describing letters in a computer from a palaeographical viewpoint. We can now start to add labels to these entities: that is, to …
Describing Handwriting, Part I
A fundamental problem of the DigiPal project is how to describe handwriting in clear, unambiguous and (ideally) standardised ways. This question has been bothering palaeographers since the eighteenth century when Scipione Maffei criticised the terminology used by Jean Mabillon, and …
ISAS 2011: Measuring the Immeasurable?
Some issues and ideas on the visualisation of palaeographical content will be discussed in the last paper of the biennial conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in Madison, WI, on August 6. I reproduce the paper abstract here: Palaeographers …
