New Audacious Research Project, In Codice Ratio, Bets on AI and OCR To Make Sense of Handwritten Texts in Vatican's Secret Archives (theatlantic.com)

A new project untangles the handwritten texts in one of the world's largest historical collections. From a report: The Vatican Secret Archives is one of the grandest historical collections in the world. It's also one of the most useless. The grandeur is obvious. Located within the Vatican's walls, next door to the Apostolic Library and just north of the Sistine Chapel, the VSA houses 53 linear miles of shelving dating back more than 12 centuries. That said, the VSA isn't much use to modern scholars, because it's so inaccessible. Of those 53 miles, just a few millimeters' worth of pages have been scanned and made available online. Even fewer pages have been transcribed into computer text and made searchable. If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply for special access, schlep all the way to Rome, and go through every page by hand.

But a new project could change all that. Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time. If successful, the technology could also open up untold numbers of other documents at historical archives around the world.

Comments

Re: Another Sheetfeed And Destroy Project?

[DingerX]

Hell no. You don't digitize manuscripts destructively. There's not yet an official standard for digitizing medieval MSS, but the short version is that amateurs use cellphones or consumer cameras, wannabes use "archival scanners" (which require the document to be flat), and pros use a rig with medium-format cameras. but, for OCR, as their examples show, the current tech doesn't benefit from detailed images. This team is starting with the Papal Registers, which the ASV has been selling in a 300 dpi black-and-white (not grayscale) format for at least 15 years. 96% character recognition is about what other MSS OCR teams are getting. As TFA implies, people don't write letters; they write words, but you can't get the computational power to read words. So this inherently limits their approach, even with easy-to-read Carolingian Miniscule (the picture, btw, is of a "transitional hand" or "proto-gothic" more than CM). So they then choose between likely readings according to latinity. Cool, but with archival documents, the most valuable information for traditional research are the proper names, and these are usually less "Latinish" than the rest, so the net result is to increase the batting average slightly while grounding into a lot more double plays. In short: pilot project that uses digitizations from 2 generations back, produces results that aren't useful thanks to methodology dictated by current technology, and makes a few interesting tweaks. It would be cool to see, but first it'd be great to digitize and publish online the ASV. Of course, it's not so bad to go to Rome, go through the rigamarole of getting access to the ASV, and working directly with the originals. But the current catalog system dates from the eighteenth century, and is harder to read than the medieval manuscripts. So, you get what you can; if you're lucky they let you stay till 1600. Then you gotta find something to do in Rome until the next morning.

Re:Easier said than done

[Orgasmatron]

Cuneiform texts have similar problems, and translation is a tedious process. I'm hopeful that new systems can help automate the process, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.

For a hint at the problems, cuneiform was used for thousands of years, across several languages.

In the early days, it was very terse, writing just the key words that would allow a literate native speaker of the language to reconstruct the real sentence. You would have a sentence written as "(picture of a man) (picture of a house) (picture of a noun that sounds like the verb to-build)". The reader would be expected to know that the intended sentence was something like "Lugale-e-mundu" or "The King built the house" and infer from the context (for example stamped on the still-wet bricks) that it meant "The king ordered the construction of these houses" or whatever.

Over time, the symbols were pared down from little drawings to simplified figures, to abstract representations, to a couple of strokes that carry very little similarity to the original drawings.

At the same time, the scribes got really inventive with the symbols. A written symbol could mean the noun that it once resembled, or it could mean a verb that sounds similar to the noun, or it could be a syllable, or it could be a marker to indicate that the next or previous stuff was a proper name, or the name of a deity.

Additionally, symbols multiplied. They ended up with dozens of symbols for the "e" sound, for example, with different meanings. So you could have two sentences with different meanings that sounded exactly the same, but they could be written with exact symbols, or with generic symbols.

To make things even more fun, Sumerian died out as a spoken language long before it faded as a written language. So, the scribes lost confidence in their writing and started gradually writing everything out longhand. This actually turned out to be fantastic for us, because it let us see the structure of the spoken language in ways that were completely hidden in older writings.

And other cultures with completely different unrelated languages started using the writing system. So you might find a tablet that you can't translate because it is Akkadian written phonetically, for example. Even worse, it could be written as if it were Sumerian, so the structure would make sense, but the names wouldn't.

That is actually how the Sumerian language was re-discovered ~1200 years after it died completely. There was a language still living enough for scholars to know what it sounded like, and ancient clay tablets written by people who had spoken that language centuries before.

The scholars noticed two things. First, there was a huge pile of those tablets that were completely incomprehensible. And second, that the ones they could read showed a writing system that was a hilariously bad fit for the written language. Like the subject, object and verb order was SVO when spoken, but SOV when written, and the written language was full of markers that were not present in the spoken language, and the markers in the spoken language were completely absent in the writing system.

Eventually, they figured out that they were looking at several different languages, and they were able to reconstruct Sumerian from that mess.

Anyhow, to process one of these tablets, you need to examine the strokes in the clay and match them to symbols. Then you take a wild guess at which language you think it might be and see if you can find a meaningful translation in that language. If not, you go back to pick a different language and try again. And again, and again.

Because of the tedium of doing this by hand, and the very short supply of people who know these languages and can do the work, our museums quite literally have tons of these tablets that have never been translated.

Other ancient writings face a similar problem. We have more of them in storage than we know what to do with. It was big news a few weeks ago that a 1500-year old C