Digital Palaeography: the new perspectives offered by computational handwriting analyses

30th International Congress of Papyrology

Plenary Session: The New Challenges of Papyrology: The Post-Papy Boom Era

Abstract: Palaeography has often been considered an ancillary discipline to papyrology, mostly reduced to its ability to date texts in absence of internal evidence, and regularly questioned for being subjective. The growing access to images of papyri, the development of digital tools and the significant advances of Handwriting Analysis in Computer Science are changing the game. One of the most striking characteristics of digital palaeography is its capacity to overcome traditional disciplinary boundaries since approaches elaborated on one kind of documents, e.g. ancient Vietnamese steles, can be adapted to a totally different one, like handwriting on papyrus whatever its language. This talk will give an overview of the current projects involved in digital palaeography in Demotic, Hebrew, Greek, Coptic and Arabic, will underline the main methodological benefits of these approaches and consider some of the most promising directions for the future.

Export event as iCal