The archive of Dioscorus of Aphrodito (6th c. A.D.) is the richest papyrus archive of the Byzantine period. Gathering more than 700 texts of various content, it provides a unique opportunity to study day-to-day cursive writing and literacy in the microcosm of an Egyptian village.

From the Dioscorus archive was selected a dataset specially tailored for the task of Writer Identification, see GRK-Papyri

GRK-Papyri_120 is an extension of GRK-Papyri from 50 to 120 images of papyri. It was segmented into rows to form the Papy-Row dataset (accessible here) and presented during the PatReCH workshop in ICPR 2020, see here.

GRK-Papyri_97 is a selection of GRK-Papyri_120 to count only 19 writers (97 images) is a study currently submitted to ICDAR 2023.

GRK-Papyri and Papy-Row are the basis or the following publications:

• Nasir S., Siddiqi I., Moetesum M. (2021) "Writer Characterization from Handwriting on Papyri Using Multi-step Feature Learning". In: Barney Smith E.H., Pal U. (eds) Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2021 Workshops. ICDAR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12916. Access here.
• Nasir S., Siddiqi I. (2021) "Learning Features for Writer Identification from Handwriting on Papyri". In: Djeddi C., Kessentini Y., Siddiqi I., Jmaiel M. (eds) Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence. MedPRAI 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1322. Access here.
• V. Christlein, I. Marthot-Santaniello, M. Mayr, A. Nicolaou, M. Seuret, “Writer Retrieval and Writer Identification in Greek Papyri”, eds. C. Carmona-Duarte, M. Diaz, M.A. Ferrer, A. Morales, Intertwining Graphonomics with Human Movements. IGS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13424. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19745-1_6. See also video 18 on this page from Neo-Paleography Conference
• M. Peer and R. Sablatnig, Feature Mixing for Writer Retrieval and Identification on Papyri Fragments, in HIP'23: 7th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (Jan Jose, CA, USA August 2023), https://doi.org/10.1145/3604951.3605515
• N. D. Cilia, T. D’Alessandro, C. De Stefano, F. Fontanella, I. Marthot-Santaniello, M. Molinara and A. Scotto Di Freca, “A Novel Writer Identification Approach for Greek Papyri Images”, 4th International Workshop on Pattern Recognition for Cultural Heritage (PatReCH 2023), Udine, Italy, September 11, 2023. Forthcoming publication https://aida.unicas.it/patrech2023/index.html

Sidra Nasir, "Identification of Scribes from Historical Manuscripts", Masters thesis in Computer Science defended in April 2021 at Bahria University, Islamabad, downloadable here.