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

140
scholars <strong>in</strong> the humanities,” Stokes concluded, “and it may well be that the plug-<strong>in</strong>s should allow both
‘computer-friendly’ and ‘human-friendly’ output, with the latter <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g graphical or even <strong>in</strong>teractive
displays”(Stokes 2009).
Recent work by Arianna Ciula (Ciula 2009) has also explored the methodological issues <strong>in</strong>volved <strong>in</strong>
us<strong>in</strong>g digital technology to support palaeographical analysis of medieval handwrit<strong>in</strong>g. She ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>ed
that digital methods would assist palaeographers only if the complex nature of the cultural artifacts
they studied were also considered. In addition, she argued that the identification of “critical processes
with<strong>in</strong> the palaeographic method” was essential before any tools were developed. Digital tools needed
to make the steps of scholarly analysis more explicit, Ciula <strong>in</strong>sisted, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g “analyses, comparisons,
and classifications.” S<strong>in</strong>ce palaeography is closely related to many other classical discipl<strong>in</strong>es, Ciula
also argued that a more <strong>in</strong>tegrated digital environment of tools and resources was necessary:
Therefore, <strong>in</strong>dependently from its more or less limited scope, the more any digital tool or
resource—be<strong>in</strong>g it a digital facsimile of a manuscript, an application to segment letter forms, a
digital edition, or an electronic publication of other k<strong>in</strong>d—can be <strong>in</strong>tegrated with<strong>in</strong> an
environment where complementary material is also accessible, the more it becomes
exponentially useful to the palaeographer (Ciula 2009).
Palaeographers <strong>in</strong> particular need more visual representations of manuscripts and open-access
comprehensive collections.
In her own work, Ciula developed a comput<strong>in</strong>g application called “System for Palaeographic
Inspection”(SPI) for work she conducted as a graduate student. Ciula scanned the leaves of several
codices and developed a basic system that <strong>in</strong>cluded image preprocess<strong>in</strong>g, <strong>in</strong>sertion of images <strong>in</strong>to a
relational database, segmentation of handwrit<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> images <strong>in</strong>to relevant letters and ligatures, and
automatic generation of letter models. She created extensive documentation regard<strong>in</strong>g her choice of
digitization criteria, the ref<strong>in</strong>ement and evaluation of segmentation processes, and tun<strong>in</strong>g the
parameters for generat<strong>in</strong>g letter models. For this she made extensive use of the large body of literature
on manuscript digitization and OCR development, but she underscored that the development of this
system required extensive doma<strong>in</strong> knowledge as well:
On the other hand, the <strong>in</strong>terpretative phase based on the analysis of the letter models and their
automatic cluster<strong>in</strong>g has required <strong>in</strong>sights <strong>in</strong>to a much more established tradition of do<strong>in</strong>g
palaeography. The comparison of types of letterforms—which is the ma<strong>in</strong> objective of
analytical palaeography—has not effectively been supported so far by any tool. Therefore, the
major challenge was represented by the attempt to <strong>in</strong>tegrate and support the palaeographical
method with<strong>in</strong> a digital humanities (as def<strong>in</strong>ed by McCarty …) research approach (Ciula 2009).
One of the greatest challenges faced by many digital classics practitioners was the need for both
extensive discipl<strong>in</strong>ary expertise and technical knowledge.
The tool she developed had a number of technical limitations, Ciula granted, and she commented that
various scholarly stages of <strong>in</strong>terpretation, such as letter segmentation and model generation, were
assisted by the tool but not “comprehensively and systematically supported by the tool itself.” The
most powerful function of the SPI was its ability to “compute graphical features”; this assisted
palaeographic analysis by mak<strong>in</strong>g variations between characters more perceptible to human vision.
Ciula nonetheless emphasized that her tool was meant to assist scholars, not replace them, and this
raised the question of how well digital tools could ever model scholarly expertise. “How much of the