Digital Resource for Palaeography

New Vacancy on the Team

Peter A. Stokes — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:03:42 +0000

We are recruiting for an additional developer on the project team!

This is formally a two-year post, to the end of June 2014, but in practice it is very likely to be extendable for an additional three months to the end of the project. Essentially we are looking for someone with skills and experience in implementing complex websites using an PostgreSQL-Django-HTML/JavaScript framework. It will involve programming both for the front end delivery and data entry on the back end. You will be working closely with the existing DigiPal team as the principal developer and will be responsible for most of the development work in practice.

The appointment is for 100% (full time) and you will be based in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London but dedicated to the DigiPal project alone (for which see these pages, particularly the About section and the Outcomes page).

Full details of the appointment are available from the King’s Vacancies page. For further questions or informal discussion please contact the Project Director, Peter Stokes, directly.

Please note that applications close on 10 June 2012, so you do not have long to apply. We apologise for the short notice, but this is simply because we are eager to get someone started as soon as possible.

Palaeography Training in London

Peter A. Stokes — Mon, 07 May 2012 14:12:42 +0000

Two upcoming classes on palaeography to be held at the Institute of English Studies in London have just come to my attention. One is very soon indeed, so if you’re interested then be sure to sign up quickly. This is the information I have, reproduced verbatim from the IES:

LONDON PALAEOGRAPHY SUMMER SCHOOL
18 – 22 June 2012
The London Palaeography Summer School is a series of intensive courses in Palaeography and Diplomatic. Courses range from a half to two days duration and are given by experts in their respective fields from a wide range of institutions.

INSULAR MANUSCRIPTS MASTER CLASS
18 MAY 2012, 10.00-17.00
The Institute of English Studies will be holding a one-day master class on Insular Manuscripts on Friday 18^th May. This course is run on behalf of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) and will cover:

Origins of insular manuscripts (Mark Stansbury)

Lindisfarne Gospels (Michelle Brown)

Book of Kells (Carol Farr)

Southumbrian Manuscripts (Michelle Brown)

All the courses are suitable for MA, MRes, MPhil and PhD students and are also open to professional and other participants.

For enquiries, registration and programme information:
http://ies.sas.ac.uk | Tel: +44 (0)20 7862-8680
E-mail: cmps [at] sas [dot] ac [dot] uk

They both look very interesting, but you’ll need to sign up fast!

DigiPal at Kalamazoo 2012

Peter A. Stokes — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:26:19 +0000

The DigiPal project will be well represented at the International Congress of Medieval Studies (ICMS) Kalamazoo 2012.

The main event is a session we are sponsoring called ‘Digital Methods and Resources for Paleography and Manuscript Studies’ and will be on Thursday 10 May at 7:30pm in Fetzer 2030 (Session 159 in the conference schedule).

The papers are:

imageMAT: A Tool for Interoperable Image Annotation. Christine McWebb, Univ. of Waterloo
Digital Paleography: Thinking inside the Box. Stewart Brookes, King’s College London
The Ongoing Problem of English Vernacular Minuscule: A Digital Approach to Late Anglo-Saxon Script. Peter A. Stokes, King’s College London

We also hope to be at the ‘Projects in Digital Medieval Studies’ poster session sponsored by Digital Medievalist. This will be on Friday 11 May at 7.30pm in Fetzer 1035 and should be an excellent opportunity to discuss DigiPal in more detail. [Edit, 7 May 2012: We are now confirmed for the poster session and will be demonstrating the latest developments in the project, so be sure to come along and see us.]

Finally, Peter Stokes will be co-teaching a workshop on Digital Imaging for Medievalists, on Saturday 12 May at 1.30pm in Schneider 446 (Session 2145). This will be taught with Tony Harris of the University of Reading and will cover both some basic insights into the technical background behind digital images, and also some practical advice and examples on how to use them for online delivery. The summary from the conference schedule is as follows:

This workshop is designed to help medievalists who are working with digital resources. The session includes a short discussion on best practices for desktop scanning, use of digital cameras for manuscript capture, and use of hand scanners and digital authoring using PDF and XML. Attendees will have the opportnity to discuss common problems and solutions.

It will be a busy week, and we look forward to seeing you there!

Public Lecture: Books, Runes and Writing

Peter A. Stokes — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 11:10:18 +0000

An afternoon of talks for the public on the Anglo-Saxons will be taking place in central London on the 21 March 2012. Called ‘The Anglo-Saxons: Who? Where? When? Why?’, it promises a series of sessions on the history, language, writing, economy, and literature. I will be giving a brief history of handwriting during the Anglo-Saxon period, with lots of examples of runes and runestones as well as manuscripts. Come along to learn a bit about why our alphabet looks the way it does today, as well as:

See photos of real runes written by the Anglo-Saxons on stones, bones, combs and a casket, as well as in manuscripts.
See examples of secret writing used by the Anglo-Saxons.
Learn about letters in the English alphabet which are no longer used (including why Sir Menzies Campbell’s name is pronounced the way it is).
See examples of extremely beautiful calligraphy, but also what an Anglo-Saxon shopping list looked like.
Have the chance to ask all the questions about things you always wanted to know.

I hope to see you all on the 21st!

Where? Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Russell Square, London
When? 21 March 2012, 2.15pm to 7.15pm
Details? See <http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/events/ies-conferences/LASS2012>

Ruling the Script: Seven Palaeography Sessions at Leeds IMC 2012

Peter A. Stokes — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:21:56 +0000

I am very pleased indeed to hear that the International Medieval Congress (IMC) Leeds has accepted seven sessions on palaeography this year, meaning that there will be no fewer than twenty-one papers on the subject on Wednesday 11th and Thursday 12th of July 2012. This amount of palaeography at Leeds is unprecedented to my knowledge and is thanks to the work of Georg Vogeler (Karl Franzens-Universität, Graz) and Dominique Stutzmann (IRHT, Paris), as well as the financial support of APICES, the Association paléographique internationale: Culture – Écriture – Société.

DigiPal will be represented through a paper by Peter Stokes on ‘Rule and Variation in English Vernacular Minuscule’, but there will be contributions on a wide range of other topics including computer-based measurements of scripts, other aspects of variation and regularity in handwriting, epigraphy, and artworks, incorporating not only Latin and Western European vernaculars but also material in Syriac and Hebrew.

The schedule is not yet up on the IMC website, but see instead the blog post by Dominique Stutzmann (introduction in French, but the full list of papers and abstracts is given in English). A Spanish version is also provided on the Conscriptio site by Néstor Vigil Montes.

Many congratulations to Georg and Dominique, and I look forward to a lot of interesting discussion at the sessions this July.

DigiPal ‘Highly obscure’ says Times Higher Education

Stewart J. Brookes — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:45:11 +0000

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 are being catalogued and deciphered,’ Reisz notes. ‘Virtual theatres are taking shape, Wittgenstein’s letters are being put back into context, and we can now find databases listing every 18th-century clergyman and every single person recorded in Anglo-Saxon Britain.’ Commenting on the use of digital technologies to take us into unknown and undiscovered territory, Andrew Prescott, the incoming head of the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, observes that ‘the transformation is just breathtaking. Now there’s no need for lengthy journal searches, which required an incredible amount of shoe leather.’

Amongst the digital projects that Reisz lists in his feature are the University of Oxford’s Oxyrhynchus crowd-sourcing initiative Ancient Lives, and four projects based at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London: the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain, and the Online Chopin Variorum Edition.

Of course, it would be remiss to discuss digital humanities without mentioning another project based at the Department of Digital Humanities: DigiPal. Reisz is aware of this: ‘there does seem to be evidence that even highly obscure topics generate more interest than one would ever expect. DigiPal, the Digital Resource for Palaeography, based at King’s College London, focuses on the study of 11th-century handwriting. Although the website is still rudimentary, it has already had about 2,000 hits over the past three to four months.’

In the weeks since Reisz’s pilgrimage to DigiPal, the number of visits to our site has exceeded 8,000, with a particular favourite being ‘Describing Handwriting Part V’ (sequel to the parts that our other blog posts haven’t reached). Not world-conquering numbers as yet, but not so small as to be inaudible either. And just think of the incredible amount of shoe leather we have saved.

Read the full article here: Times Higher Education

Medieval Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age (MMSDA) 2012

Peter A. Stokes — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:03:29 +0000

Applications are now open for MMSDA 2012 from PhD students from any COST country – which basically means from anywhere in Europe or Israel! This may not be the case next year, so be sure to get in now while you still can.

The Institute of English Studies (London) is pleased to announce the fourth year of ‘Medieval Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age’, an intensive course for PhD students jointly funded by COST and the AHRC, and run in collaboration with King’s College London, the Warburg Institute, and the University of Cambridge.

The course is open to arts and humanities doctoral students registered at institutions in any of the thirty-six COST countries. It involves five days of intensive training on the analysis, description and editing of medieval manuscripts in the digital age to be held jointly in Cambridge and London. Participants will receive a solid theoretical foundation and hands-on experience in cataloguing and editing manuscripts for both print and digital formats.

The first half of the course involves morning classes and then visits to libraries in Cambridge and London in the afternoons. Participants will view original manuscripts and gain practical experience in applying the morning’s themes to concrete examples. In the second half we will address the cataloguing and description of manuscripts in a digital format with particular emphasis on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). These sessions will also combine theoretical principles and practical experience and include supervised work on computers.

The course is free of charge but is open only to doctoral students registered at institutions in COST countries. It is aimed at those writing dissertations which relate to medieval manuscripts, especially those on literature, art and history. Some bursaries will be available for travel and accommodation, courtesy of COST, to be assigned based on an even distribution of nationality and gender. Places on the course are limited to twenty. Applications close on 13 January 2012 but early registration is strongly recommended.

For further details see http://ies.sas.ac.uk/StudyAndResearchTraining/MMSDA/ or contact Dr Peter Stokes at mmsda [at] sas [dot] ac [dot] uk. [Edit, 2 March 2012: The URL has now changed to http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/study-training/research-training-courses/medieval-manuscripts-digital-age]

Funding for this course is generously provided by the AHRC’s Collaborative Training Scheme and by COST Action IS1005, ‘Medieval Europe – Medieval Cultures and Technological Resources’.

CFP, Writing Europe before 1450 Colloquium

Peter A. Stokes — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:54:58 +0000

The ‘Writing Europe before 1450′ Colloquium will be held in Bergen in June 2012. The website is at http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/news/conferences/writing-europe, and the full Call for Papers is reproduced below. It should be an interesting conference!

Dear Colleagues,

We are delighted to open a CFP for the Writing Europe before 1450: A Colloquium, University of Bergen, 3rd-5th June 2012. After the success of the Writing England Conference in 2010, Writing Europe: A Colloquium aims to draw on a range of approaches and perspectives to exchange ideas about manuscript studies, material culture, multilingualism in texts and books, book history, readers, audience and scribes across the medieval period and beyond

Plenary speakers: William Johnson (Duke University); Kathryn A. Lowe (University of Glasgow); Marilena Maniaci (Universita` di Cassino)

CALL FOR PAPERS

We welcome proposals from scholars working on writers, book production and use, and responses to texts in any language up to 1450. Abstracts (300 words or less) for papers (20 minutes) should be submitted on-line using the form provided. Please visit the conference web site for additional information. To encourage participation from a range of individuals and institutions, a limited number of bursaries will be available to assist in covering travel expenses for participants with limited institutional support.

Places are limited to allow us to subsidise costs, including registration, accommodation and meals. Please send your abstract by 31 January 2012. For further information please contact one of the organisers at the e-mail below.

Conference web site: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/news/conferences/writing-europe

Writing Europe before 1450 is a collaboration between the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen and the School of English at the University of Leicester, and is generously subsidised by the Centre for Medieval Studies and by the School of English.

Attached a PDF form of the call, we’d be very grateful if you could distribute as widely as possible.

With best wishes,

Aidan, Orietta and Phil

Dr Orietta Da Rold
Lecturer in Chaucer and Medieval Literature
School of English
University of Leicester
University Road
LE1 7RH

Tel. +44 (0)116 252 2778
e-mail: odr1 [at] le [dot] ac [dot] uk

Describing Handwriting, Part V: English Vernacular Minuscule

Peter A. Stokes — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:47:56 +0000

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 description of the letters, components and features of English Vernacular minuscule. As mentioned in Part II, there are several sources for terminology, and of course there are many others beyond that, particularly including those by Malcolm Parkes which David Ganz kindly reminded us of in his comment to Part I. It must be emphasised that this is simply a first draft based on Stokes, English Vernacular Script, and will undoubtedly need considerable refining. In particular, I use the terminology that I am familiar with, but in a future post I plan to produce a table of equivalent terms. For now I am more interested in the principles, though: is this a valid model? Please post comments below!

Components of Letters and Punctuation

These are all the components that a letter must have to be recognisable as such (what Parkes calls ‘essential elements’):

a: bowl (also called bow or lobe), back
æ: a-component (comprising bowl), e-component (comprising eye, lower curve/bowl)
b: ascender, bowl
c: hook, bowl (or is this something different, e.g. a lower curve?)
d: bowl, ascender or back
e: eye (comprising hook, tongue), bowl (or is this something different, e.g. a lower curve?)
f: hook, tongue, descender or downstroke
g: mid-component or bowl (see below), tail
h: ascender, arch (comprising upper curve and also down-stroke/minim: see below)
i: minim
k: ascender, upper branch, lower branch
l: ascender
m: minim, middle arch, final arch
n: minim, arch [For minuscule only, but majuscule n is sometimes found in otherwise minuscule script]
o: bowl
p: bowl, descender
q: bowl, descender
r: Either minim and hook, or descender and arch (see below)
s: [See below]
t: top-stroke, bowl (or is this something different, e.g. a lower curve?)
thorn: bowl, ascender, descender
eth: bowl, back, cross-stroke
u: minims
wynn: descender, bowl
x: right-to-left stroke (comprising north-west and south-east branches), north-east branch, south-west branch
y: [See below]
z: top-stroke, diagonal stroke, bottom stroke (optional tail)
7: top stroke, descender (but is this descender the same as other descenders?)
punctus: point
punctus versus: point, comma
punctus elevatus: point, up-stroke
punctus interrogativus: point, top-stroke

Components of Allographs

These terms can undoubtedly be adjusted and standardised more; I put them here as a starting-point. Even here, though, there are problems, particularly with s and y, but also with f, g and r. This is because these letters can have drastically different forms, even in the Anglo-Saxon period, and so one cannot easily find components which are necessarily common to each. To resolve this we need to go to the level of allograph:

f Caroline: hook, tongue, down-stroke
f Insular: hook, tongue, minim
g Caroline: bowl, tail
g Insular: top-stroke, mid-component, g-tail
r Caroline: hook, down-stroke
r Insular: hook, descender
s round: upper curve, lower curve
s tall: hook, down-stroke
s Caroline: hook, down-stroke
s long: hook, down-stroke, descender
s low: hook, descender
y straight-limbed: upper left branch, right-to-left stroke (comprising upper right branch, y-tail)
y round: top-to-bottom stroke (comprising upper left branch, y-tail), upper right branch
y f-shaped: upper branch, lower branch, y-tail

Other allographs include the remaining distinctive letters of Caroline script, plus some others:

a Caroline: Also has a head
c horned: Also has a horn
e horned: Also has a horn
d Caroline: Has an ascender (not a back)
d Insular: Has a back (not an ascender)

You might reasonably ask why Caroline letter-forms are included in a description of Vernacular minuscule: the answer is simply that these forms appear often in otherwise Vernacular script and so need to be taken into account.

Sub-Components

Some components have components themselves:

bowl: south-west quadrant
eye: hook, tongue
ascenders and minims: top-decoration
descender and minim: foot
back (of eth and insular d): tip
back (of a and æ): foot
arch: shoulder, downstroke, foot (I argue that the downstroke is not a minim for my per

The ‘arch’ is problematic but refers to the common part of h, m, n, and Insular r, including not just the top curve itself but also the full down-stroke and foot. In Vernacular minuscule the down-strokes here are not necessarily treated in the same way as minims and should not be considered as such (unlike Gothic Textura, for example).

General Features

These features can apply to any letter and (in principle) any stroke:

Pen: Thick/thin/medium width; blobby; flat/angled
Writing Angle: Upright, forward-leaning, backward-leaning
Rotundity: Angular, rounded
General Aspect: Messy, neat; narrow; spidery; bulging; heavy; shaded; level cue-height
Connectedness: Separate/conjoined/ligatured

Component features

These are features of specific components or sub-components:

Ascenders: long/short/minim-length; sway-backed; backward-leaning
Back (of eth and Insular d): Bilinear/45°/upright; long/short; straight/concave up/concave down/broken; backward-reaching
Back (of a and æ): Long, straight/round
Bowl: Concave left/concave right/angled south-west quadrant/round/square; horned; point-topped/flat-topped
Descenders: Turned left/curved/straight/tapering; foot/no foot; long/short/minim-length; angled forward/vertical/angled back (esp. relevant for 7)
Eye: Squinting/open
Foot: Angled up/angled down/horizontal/absent; long/short
Hook: Angled/flat/bulging/high; long/short; deeply split; looped
Mid-component (of Insular g): Angular; large/small; Hangs from left/middle/right
Minim curve: Shoulder angled/bulging/rounded; deeply split; downstroke rounded/straight; downstroke turned in/out
Tail (of g): On left/middle/right; narrow/wide/oblong/round/angular; open/closed/3/4 closed; tip horizontal/curved down/curved up
Tail (of y): Hooked/straight/curved
Cross-stroke (of eth): High; concave up/down; hooked down/up/no hook; through/not through
Tip (of back): Vertical/turned back/turned down/wedged/trailing left
Top treatment (of minims and ascenders): Vertically symmetric, horizontally symmetric, wedged, barbed, clubbed, approach-stroke, back-reaching, flat-topped, split, forked, tapering on left, blobby, none
Top Stroke: Convex/flat/~-shaped; left hooked up/down, rising; at cue-height/above cue-height; short/long; turned-up right
Tongue: Angled/horizontal/convex; long/short; turned down/turned up; rising; thick/thin; on left

Letter features

These are specific to particular letters. Arguably some (or even most) of these are allographs, but the distinction is a difficult one:

a: Caroline/semi-Caroline/cc/teardrop-shaped/round/square
æ: As for a and e
d: [Arguably round/upright (or Insular/Caroline), but these are probably best covered as allographs and via the back component.]
f: Caroline/Insular
g: 3-shaped/S-shaped (or make these features of the mid-component?)/Caroline
h: Caroline/Insular
k: c-shaped/arm up; descender
l: Round bottom/angled bottom
n: Majuscule/minuscule
r: R-shaped; Wulfstanian
s: Tall (or long) before t; tall (or long) before wynn; tall (or long) initial; tall (or long) with t only; tall (or long) in ligature with t only; tall high wedge; high round
t: Turned-up/down toe; closed
thorn: Predominant/initial/conventional
eth: Flagpole, predominant/initial/conventional
x: Bilinear/long southwest quadrant; three-stroke
y: Bilinear; dotted/undotted; high right (straight or round only); hooked right (straight or round only)
z: Bilinear, high, long southwest stroke; diagonal descender
7: High top right
punctus: On baseline/at mid-height/at cue-height

Again, there will undoubtedly be additions and changes to this list, but it should provide a useful starting-point. In the next post I hope to take this further by applying it to some more concrete examples.

Describing Handwriting, Part IV: Recapitulation and Formal Model

Peter A. Stokes — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 14:14:37 +0000

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 brought up with UML, Unified Modelling Language, which is a formal way of expressing entities and relationships in a way that a computer can understand. This is very technical and not at all easy to understand unless you’re already familiar with it, but I give it now partly as a way of documenting what we are doing and also for those of you who are already familiar with the system. The diagram here doesn’t follow the rules of UML to the letter but should at least be close enough to capture the idea.

My first version of a UML Class Diagram for the conceptual model so far is as follows (click on it to enlarge):

[Edit, 17 October 2011: The UML diagram has been altered from the original by associating Script, Scribe and Hand directly with Component as a way of capturing elements of style which are common across multiple characters.]

What does this mean?

Starting at the top, it states that a GRAPHEME is associated with one or more CHARACTERS (for ‘Character’ see below). A CHARACTER is made up of any number of COMPONENTS. A COMPONENT in turn can be found in any number of CHARACTERS and can have one or more FEATURES or indeed any number of further COMPONENTS.
A CHARACTER can also be manifested in one or more ALLOGRAPHS, and a set of ALLOGRAPHS makes up a SCRIPT. ALLOGRAPHS themselves can have COMPONENTS which have FEATURES, but ALLOGRAPHS also have GENERALFEATURES which are the aspects of ‘style’ discussed in Part III. A set of ALLOGRAPHS together makes up a SCRIPT.
Each ALLOGRAPH can be manifested in any number of IDIOGRAPHS (which in turn have COMPONENTS and GENERAL FEATURES). A set of IDIOGRAPHS makes up the practice of a SCRIBE.
Each IDIOGRAPH can appear on the PAGE as a GRAPH; GRAPHS have the usual set of GENERAL FEATURES and COMPONENTS, as well as a set of coordinates. The set of GRAPHS makes up a SCRIBAL HAND.
SCRIBAL HANDS are written by exactly one SCRIBE (but a SCRIBE can write many SCRIBAL HANDS); a SCRIBAL HAND may also be written in one or more SCRIPTS and may use one or more ALPHABETS.

Conceptual Questions

This discussion raises some conceptual questions that I can see:

Is GRAPH – IDIOGRAPH – ALLOGRAPH – CHARACTER – GRAPHEME a simple association or one of specialisation? I can see arguments for both.
Is SCRIBE the correct term here? Strictly the SCRIBE is a person, whereas the set of IDIOGRAPHS make up a scribal practice.
Based on the discussion of Style in Part III, shouldn’t there be relationships from SCRIBE and SCRIBAL HAND directly to GENERAL STYLE (or some other entity)?
Are the cardinalities correct? Can a CHARACTER really have no COMPONENTS? I think so, at least in the abstract — what are the components of a punctus, for example? Or should ‘dot’ be considered a COMPONENT, in which case even a punctus is covered?
The relationship names are not in place, partly because I’m not entirely confident about the terminology I used previously. In what sense is an allograph related to an idiograph? Do we have a terminology for this? It feels to me very analogous to Group 1 entities in FRBR but I’m not convinced that the terms apply directly.

Terminology (again): When is a Grapheme not a Grapheme? When it’s a Character?

I have also come to appreciate that graphemes refer only to the abstract and do not in themselves have a physical manifestation; they are therefore not relevant to palaeography and so we need another term. A useful source here is the Glossary of Unicode Terms and Section 4 in Chapter 3 of the Unicode Standard, since they have been dealing with these concepts for a long time and in a way that requires much more precision than palaeographers need. For instance, a grapheme properly has no physical form and so cannot be described or even considered in a palaeographical context; here Unicode’s Character or perhaps Abstract Character seems more correct. Note that, according to Sense (1) in the Unicode standard, ‘character’ is ‘[t]he smallest component of written language that has semantic value’: it follows, therefore, that ‘A’ and ‘a’ are instances of the same character. Note, however, that this is not the usual definition in computer science and doesn’t even seem to be the definition usually applied to Unicode which seems more like Sense (3), ‘The basic unit of encoding for the Unicode character encoding’ (sic). Presumably this is the sense meant when ‘LATIN CAPITAL A’ is described as a different character to ‘LATIN SMALL LETTER A’. This definition does seem to work here, since in palaeography we must distinguish between minuscule and majuscule forms. Unicode’s ‘Letter’ is not strictly appropriate, (a) because it excludes punctuation and other symbols such as the Tironian nota, and (b) because it’s not clear to me, at least, if it can include a visual form (what exactly is the ‘informative property’ of a character?). I therefore stick with ‘character’ for the time being, but am very open to suggestions. In the next post, I will continue towards a concrete example, starting with lists of all the characters, components, features and some allographs of English Vernacular minuscule.