A Character Style Library for Syriac Manuscripts
Nicholas R. Howe, Alice Yang, Michael Penn · 2015
Paleographers study ancient and historical handwriting in order to learn more about documents of significant interest and their creators. Computational tools and methods can aid this task in numerous ways, particularly for languages and scripts that are not widely known today. One project currently underway seeks to gather a collection of securely dated letter samples from Syriac documents dating between 500 and 1100 CE. The set comprises over 60,000 human-selected character samples. This paper gives details on the collection and describes the automatic techniques used to process the initial human input so as to produce high-quality segmented character samples ready for analysis.