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Our next speaker in the ATNU Virtual Speaker Series is Hannah Busch from the CCeH at the University of Cologne who will talk to us about "Matching Medieval Manuscripts with Machine Learning".

Join us on Wednesday 19 February 2025 at 4pm UK time. (We will send the zoom link to all registered attendees shortly before the event.)

"Matching Medieval Manuscripts with Machine Learning" Hannah Busch (University of Cologne) Wednesday 19 February 2025 4pm (GMT) (8am PT, 11am ET)

Abstract: Large-scale digitization projects of the past twenty years and the possibility of exploitation with the help of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) have substantially contributed to reaching a critical mass which allows the application of deep learning for the study of medieval book scripts. In the past years, not only the number of digitized medieval sources increased significantly, but also the quality of the image data. Parallel to this development, the computation of images is becoming more powerful, and—more importantly—affordable.

During my presentation I am going to talk about the possibilities of dating and localizing the origin of medieval Latin manuscripts with the help of Deep Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence. I will be giving insights in how to approach such an undertaking of building an image similarity search based on palaeographical features of medieval Latin scripts. In particular, I’ll be focusing on the reuse of existing scholarly manuscript descriptions for the training of Artificial Neural Networks and the challenges that come with relying on those new technologies. How is the palaeographic information encoded in descriptive metadata? Can manuscript metadata be read and processed by the machine? Can it be used to teach Artificial Neural Networks which manuscript samples are similar by means of Latin palaeography? To conclude my presentation, I’d like to discuss how we can build a bridge between the output of the artificial palaeographic eye and the human readable descriptive metadata.

Bio: Hannah Busch studied German-Italian Studies (BA) and Textual Scholarship (MA) in Bonn, Florence, and Berlin. She worked as a research associate at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, and as a PhD candidate within the project “Digital Forensics for Historical Documents” at the Huygens Instituut (KNAW) in Amsterdam and at Leiden University. In her doctoral thesis, she is working on the application of deep machine learning methods for the dating and localization of medieval Latin manuscripts. Her research interests also lie in various areas of digital medieval studies, in particular the (mass) digitization of medieval written documents and experimentation with computer-aided methods for manuscript research. Since June 2023, Hannah is a research associate at the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH) within the academy project Formation of Europe. ===

If you missed our previous talks you can see recordings of them at: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/atnu/speakers/