BREACHING THE STRONGROOM

A Pervasive Informatics Approach to Working with Medieval Manuscripts

Peter Ainsworth and Mike Meredith

Department of French and Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, 34 Gell Street, Sheffield, U.K.

Keywords: Pervasive, Informatics, e-Research, Imaging, Cloud, Humanities.

Abstract: This paper outlines a pervasive approach to informatics-enhanced humanities research on medieval

manuscripts. Digital surrogates (created for conservational as much as for research purposes) provide a first

step towards ‘breaching the strongroom’. Yet even when libraries can offer scholars digital copies of

manuscripts, the holdings available rarely match up as a corpus to those sought by a particular scholar.

Progress towards overcoming the mismatch has begun to be made via large-scale online digitisation

initiatives such as the Roman de la Rose, e-Codices and Europeana Regia projects, collating thousands of

items from research libraries on different continents. Focusing on the Online Froissart project, the paper

looks first at some new tools for making online manuscript collections more genuinely pervasive, insofar as

they allow users to move seamlessly through, across and within them. The second topic addressed is the

additional informatic uses to which the project’s electronic images are being put (using as a springboard the

analysis of their semantic content) in the wider context of e-Research conducted by an international

consortium working out of the Universities of Sheffield, Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State and South

Carolina and using the same Cloud-based technologies to investigate distinct but ultimately comparable

image corpora.

1 INTRODUCTION

In 2011 an early 15

-century manuscript of

Froissart’s Chronicles was auctioned in Paris for

450,000 €. Known to specialists as the Clumber Park

manuscript, it had originally been owned by the

Duke of Newcastle and housed until 1938 in his

library at Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire, UK. It is

one of several Froissart manuscripts forming a part

of the estates of wealthy patrons which seldom cross

the researcher’s path. In this instance the authors

were alerted to the impending sale; one of the Online

Froissart team left post-haste for Paris and by kind

permission of the auctioneers saw the manuscript at

the salerooms, taking a photographic record of it

before it went to its (anonymous) new owner.

By far the majority of Froissart manuscripts, in

contrast, are housed in major research libraries in

Paris, London and Brussels. Others again are housed

in Chicago, New York, The Hague, Toulouse,

Rouen, Glasgow, Darmstadt, Berlin and the Vatican.

Doing research on material of this kind is exciting

but sometimes unusually challenging. Some libraries

limit direct access to originals, for understandable

reasons: they represent a significant part of any

library’s cultural patrimony; their pigments and

gilding can be damaged by abrasion or careless

handling, and prolonged exposure to daylight can

cause yet more damage. A careful record will

normally be kept by the library of the dates and

number of hours’ exposure to light sustained by each

manuscript during public exhibitions or examination

by scholars. In some instances manuscripts are

deemed too fragile or light-susceptible to be released

at all, so researchers have to make do with 35mm

black-and-white or colour microfilm, never an

entirely satisfactory compromise.

2 LIBRARIES AND THEIR

MANUSCRIPTS

National libraries sometimes (not always) have their

own photographic studios and digital photography

specialists. Schedules are governed only partly by

scholarly interest in particular manuscripts;

conservation requirements determine most decisions

as to what is considered a high priority object for

digitisation, exceptions tending to occur only where

264

Ainsworth P. and Meredith M..

BREACHING THE STRONGROOM - A Pervasive Informatics Approach to Working with Medieval Manuscripts.

DOI: 10.5220/0003718702640271

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2011), pages 264-271

ISBN: 978-989-8425-81-2

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

money is not a problem, as when a scholar secures a

generous research grant that includes some money to

fund the digitisation of a particular volume or group

of manuscripts. Research Councils are reluctant to

disburse funds for digitisation alone, but may

sanction an element of such activity if it can be

shown to help address a precise research question.

Digitisation projects on the grand scale happen only

when researchers and libraries enter into mutually

beneficial partnerships with wealthy philanthropic

foundations such as the Mellon Foundation (who

approach the scholar first). The JISC (UK) and

European Framework 7 programme (EU) support

medium-scale digitisation projects, whilst requiring

them, entirely properly, to be underpinned by

specific research goals and imperatives.

Smaller research libraries may boast rich

manuscript collections but have only limited staffing

resources and insufficient infrastructure or security

to support digitisation. It can cost up to 10,000 € to

hire an appropriately skilled freelance photographer

for a 10-day shoot at home or abroad. Insurance and

requirements already alluded to such as permitted

light levels, the timespan available for the

manuscript to be exposed to light in any given year

or month, and mutually agreed image capture

standards. Nothing will happen, though, unless the

library is convinced that the photographer knows

how to handle fragile material, and unless the

manuscript has been cleared for photography. When

everything comes together the result is an invaluable

research tool that coincidentally prolongs the shelf

life of the original artefact. And the library gets to

retain a first-class digital copy for other researchers

to use as first port of call (though nothing replaces

contact with the original).

Some libraries charge per image; others charge

nothing (for bona fide research use). Some charge

proportionately for the right to publish a single

image or whole manuscript; others may invoice a

scholar for around £56K; it took several years for the

authors successfully to persuade a national library to

waive such a sum on the grounds that the images

were needed for research rather than for conversion

into a set of picture postcards. Post-shoot, it may

take a further 1-2 years for a formal letter of

authorisation to arrive releasing the images into the

public domain; publication before the agreed date

will rightly land the scholar in court. Even when

everything has been cleared, researcher and

photographer still need to ensure that copyright

straplines are exactly right. If one is publishing on

the web, additional, stringent requirements apply.

3 DIGITISING FOR PERVASIVE

EXHIBITIONS

Digitisation of ancient manuscripts serves more than

the needs of scholar or conservator. It provides, in

addition, the basis for a range of pervasive

approaches to library, museum or gallery displays.

In December 2007 the Royal Armouries (UK)

mounted an exhibition at their Yorkshire galleries in

partnership with Sheffield University’s French

Department and Tribal plc. Featuring arms, armour

and military tactics of the Hundred Years’ War (ca.

1370-1420), its narrative content was supplied by

Froissart’s Chronicles, a prime witness to the

conflict. The centrepiece was an early 15

-century

manuscript of the Chronicles lent by Stonyhurst

College, Lancashire. Its necessarily fixed display in

a sealed glazed case equipped with humidity and

temperature monitoring systems was complemented

by Kiosque, a system developed jointly by Tribal

and Sheffield University to provide enhanced access

to the visual and semantic content of the manuscript

(of which only a recto-verso display could be seen in

the showcase). RFID-powered panels designed by a

team led by Chris Rust from Sheffield Hallam

University’s Centre for Creative Design responded

to the several interests of visitors of all ages and

backgrounds. The RFID-based and Kiosque-driven

displays each provided access to multiple layers of

semantic content, complemented by evocative

soundscapes using 14

century music.

3.1 Pathways Through the Data

An important component of the Kiosque touchscreen

displays and virtual gallery tours was their provision

of pathways through the digital surrogate of

Stonyhurst College Library, ms. 1, with its glorious

miniatures and secondary decoration, and through a

good half dozen sister manuscripts also, represented

at the exhibition by their digital surrogates. Users

could in this way compare and contrast varying

visual treatments of the ‘same’ scene or episode as it

occurred in this or that manuscript. The visual and

narrative content of a handful of manuscript books

was in this way brought ‘out of the strongroom’ and

into the light of day, or in this case the more public

arena of the museum, with no damage to the

originals.

Spring 2010 saw the transfer of the Royal

Armouries exhibition to the Hôtel des Invalides

in Paris, home to the Musée national de l’Armée.

Once again, real and virtual manuscripts provided

the climax to an exhibition which (as at Leeds)

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featured the skills and products of the medieval

armourer, and of the manuscript painter and copyist.

This time the real manuscripts on show were two

sets of ‘twins’, each comprising two volumes and

normally housed, respectively, at the Public Library

in Besançon, and the Bibliothèque nationale de

France in Paris. The virtual surrogates of the four

volumes were shown as part of a wider Froissart

Manuscripts corpus comprising 6,000 high-

resolution images captured from ten digitised

volumes (2TB of data) including Stonyhurst College

Library, ms. 1.

3.2 Questions of Provenance: The

Corpus

The original manuscripts were all produced during

the first quarter of the fifteenth century, many under

the supervision of Pierre de Liffol, a bookseller who,

like some kind of medieval entrepreneur, glimpsed a

niche opportunity for the production and sale of

luxury copies of Froissart’s Chronicles to rich

patrons from the aristocracy. The story behind their

production and decoration provided part of the

backdrop to the Paris and Leeds exhibitions, the

Kiosque software helping to tell the tale to their

modern audiences.

3.3 Virtual Vellum: A Pervasive

Viewer

Slideshows from the two exhibitions can be viewed

via the Online Froissart, a new electronic edition of

the Chronicles funded by the Arts and Humanities

Research Council. A prime component of the Online

Froissart interface is an external viewer called

Virtual Vellum; it allows users of the site not only to

open up images of any given folio (displaying text,

miniature or both), but to place these next to images

selected from other virtual manuscripts for

comparison. This ostensibly simple feature is

missing from many otherwise first-rate electronic

manuscript sites such as those referred to in our

abstract. Reprising the ‘two slide projectors and

matching adjacent screens’ arrangement so belovèd

of art historians, Virtual Vellum (Figure 1) provides

a flexible interface through which to compare,

contrast and measure juxtaposed images from

different manuscript ‘books’ whose originals were

copied and illustrated in the same workshops, but

today find themselves dispersed to research libraries

across Europe and the USA.

Figure 1: Virtual Vellum showing related images from 4

different manuscripts painted by the Giac Master.

3.4 Four Books, Two Artists

The visual and semantic content of the four virtual

volumes displayed at the Invalides in 2010 is rich

and multi-layered. Art historians working on early

-century iconography and artistic schools in

Paris long ago identified the artistic hand responsible

for the primary decoration of Besançon Public

Library, ms. 864, and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale

de France, fonds français ms. 2664, as being that of

a disciple of a known artist called the Rohan Master.

The artist responsible for the miniatures of Besançon

Public Library, ms. 865 and for most of those in

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds

français ms. 2663, on the other hand, was for many

years thought to be ‘a mediocre follower’ of the

Master of the Berry Apocalypse, the latter so-called

after a copy of the Book of Revelation illustrated for

the Duke of Berry, housed today at New York’s

Pierpont Morgan Library as ms. M.133. Recent

scholarship by Inès Villela-Petit argues that this

artist deserves to be more clearly distinguished from

the Master of the Berry Apocalypse and should

henceforward be known as the Boethius Master

(having illustrated a fine copy of Boethius’s

Consolations of Philosophy). As for the illustrations

to Besançon Public Library, ms. 864, these ought

more properly to be attributed to a forerunner (rather

than a disciple) of the Rohan Master; this newly-

identified artist is henceforward to be known as the

Giac Master on account of his having illustrated a

book of Hours for Jeanne du Peschin, dame de Giac.

4 THE ONLINE FROISSART

The Paris exhibition closed in July 2010, but a

lasting record is preserved in a special number of Art

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de l’Enluminure (which served as catalogue to the

exhibition). Offering readers a comprehensive

account of the background to and semantic content

of the Paris exhibition, it can be explored alongside

the essays and transcriptions provided by the Online

Froissart. The Online Froissart also includes a large

body of complete and sample transcriptions of

Froissart manuscripts rendered on screen via TEI-

conformant XML and accompanied by a powerful

search engine and collation tool allowing users,

respectively, to locate elaborate textual strings and

to compare different versions of the ‘same’ text, in

ways that pinpoint their variant forms.

4.1 Words and Their Uses

In addition to these tools, a viewing mode in which

every word becomes clickable sends users, via a

sophisticated lemmatising tool, from a selected word

to its equivalent entry in the online Dictionnaire du

Moyen Français (ATILF Laboratory, Université de

Nancy 2). The Online Froissart has, in turn, donated

its holdings of many millions of words and texts in

Middle French to the DMF, completing the circle.

This intrinsically pervasive activity has enriched the

work of each participant in an Anglo-French

initiative funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities

Research Council and British Academy, and by the

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Further enrichment has come via this same project

through input from key partners at Edinburgh and St

Andrews Universities (Christine de Pizan Queen’s

Manuscript and Clermont-Ferrand Archives

projects).

The consortium described affords a prime

example of several projects joining forces and

breaking through disciplinary and national barriers

to generate a product infinitely richer than the sum

of the component parts. Interfaces are extended and

adapted to new uses, and different kinds of

complementary expertise brought to bear on

intractable but mutually interesting research

questions.

4.2 From Semantics to Informatics

The projects just described have focused primarily

on semantic and visual content as traditionally

understood by researchers in the humanities. We

turn now to a more pervasively forensic approach to

the data constituted by our virtual manuscript

corpus, bringing to the table the additional skills of

practicioners of informatics and e-Research.

5 DIGGING INTO DATA

In 2009 the JISC (UK), National Science Foundation

(USA) and National Endowment for the Humanities

(USA) issued a funding call under the “Digging into

Data Challenge” banner. Eight projects were funded

including one involving input from the Froissart

Manuscripts corpus. Common cause was found by

researchers working with digital images of medieval

manuscripts, 17

- and 18

-century British and

French maps of the Great Lakes, and large-scale

collections of 19

- and 20

-century quilts. The

scientific platform for the consortium, bringing

together researchers from Sheffield University’s

Department of French and Humanities Research

Institute, the National Center for Supercomputing

Applications at Urbana-Champaign, the College of

Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois,

also Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State University,

the University of South Carolina and several key

library and museum partners, is described elsewhere

(article for First Monday; see References). All of the

collections benefited mutually from the research

conducted; each team contributed to that research

and to the project’s virtual infrastructure. Algorithms

developed for one collection were subsequently

applied to the other two, in another manifestation of

pervasive informatics for the Humanities. Our

project was baptised “Digging into Data to Answer

Authorship-Related Questions” or DID-ARQ for

short. The following paragraphs home in on work

done on the Froissart Manuscripts corpus, just one

exemplification of the pervasive approach adopted

by a consortium working in the Cloud.

5.1 The Four Manuscripts Revisited

The starting point for the DID-ARQ humanists was

the four Froissart volumes from Besançon and Paris,

whose miniatures, initial letters and decorative

borders had been entrusted back in 1410-1418 to the

workshops of the Giac and Boethius Masters. These

artists, as seen earlier, were favoured by bookseller

Pierre de Liffol: their handiwork can be explored in

these and other virtual manuscripts forming a corpus

viewable via the Online Froissart website. Their

artistry, and the penmanship of the scribes given the

job of copying the texts, are an eloquent testimony

to the remarkable achievements of book trade

artisans in Paris during the first quarter of the

fifteenth century.

The DID-ARQ project considered the virtual

manuscripts no longer solely as flexible surrogates

for originals locked in closed display cases for an

exhibition, or hidden away in their several research

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libraries, but as a data source in its own right.

Relationships carefully fostered with conservators

and librarians, plus the skills of a talented specialist

photographer, had led to the capture – under almost

identical conditions – of ten complete facsimiles. As

we have seen, development of fit-for-purpose

viewing software followed in the guise of Virtual

Vellum; finally, copyright clearance was secured for

shared use across the DID-ARQ consortium of all

but two of the virtual manuscripts and their images

(the final two were cleared for use in June 2011).

5.2 Artistic Hands and Informatics

Colleagues at Illinois’s College of Fine and Applied

Arts, in partnership with NCSA, adopted as their

particular objective the exploration and interrogation

of the virtual manuscripts’ decorative and illustrative

content, concentrating on the four volumes displayed

in Paris. The Boethius Master’s approach to battle

scenes in Besançon 865 is characterised by ‘rows of

serried ranks of helmets emphasising the massing

effect of these groups of undifferentiated warriors’

(I. Villela-Petit, The Artists: The Giac Master and

the Boethius Master, illuminators of the war, essay

published on the Online Froissart). Armour is

invariably blue, conveying the bluish quality of

steel, whilst the colour of the surcoats introduces

some chromatic variety: orange, green and

sometimes dark pink or mosaic gold. The

inexpressive faces of the artist’s courtiers have a

pallid complexion shaded with blue, characteristic of

this Master.

Features typical of the Giac Master as shown in

Besançon 864 include ‘the moon faces of his

characters with their modelled pinkish-brown

complexions and elongated bodies. Where a group

of soldiery is depicted, a pale blue tint used for the

front row merges into a darker ultramarine towards

the rear, suggesting real metal’ (eadem).

Image samples were selected on grounds of their

pertinence to art historians intent on identifying and

discriminating between discrete artistic hands; they

included faces, crowns and helmets (Figure 2). To

these more traditional research questions were added

a ‘layer’ provided by e-Researchers looking at the

same data from their standpoint. This led to a fusion

of art historians’ and informaticians’ methodologies,

generating hybrid research questions:

How does the application of computer

algorithms to analysis of portrayal of the human face

or of items of armour in the miniatures help scholars

to refine the parameters of discriminating features

traditionally used by art connoisseurs for

characterising the hands of the Giac and Boethius

Masters?

What do these algorithms and their

application reveal about the hands responsible for

secondary decoration (illuminated initial letters or

marginal decoration) in the same manuscripts?

To what extent might these new techniques

assist scholars to refine current knowledge of the

human presence behind such broad-brush labels as

‘Giac Master’ or ‘Boethius Master’? Do our

preliminary results suggest the presence and activity

of more than one individual active under each of

these convenient but vague designations?

Using the virtual manuscripts corpus, specialists

in art history at Illinois supported by informaticians

took as their objective two iconographic elements

widely used by art historians as an index of

authorship. They started with two complementary

quests: (i) for consistency of colours used for

depicting the faces of queens, kings, and other

figures within the illuminations, and (ii) for

discriminating colour space representations to

characterise and separate out two or more artistic

hands. To the faces were applied algorithms used for

measuring different or differential colour spaces:

RGB (CMY), HSV, YIQ, YUV, XYZ, LAB and

LUV. Original RGB images from the database were

subjected to colour space conversion, producing an

HSV image. Segmentation algorithms generated a

Mask Image. Each of these two outcomes was then

subjected to statistical analysis (μH, μS, μV). A

strong indication of the unique colour palette

characteristic of each artistic hand duly emerged.

Our most recent work has focused on quantifying

the colour space distortions due to image

manipulations (by looking at how screen captures of

the originals were taken, at the impact of changing

file formats and of the introduction of file formats

with lossy compression, as well as the passing of

images into PowerPoint slides).

Imaginations unbound

Figure 2: Faces and Armour, Boethius Master (to the left)

and Giac Master (to the right).

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5.3 Scribal Hands and Informatics

The Sheffield operation concentrated on the copying

process and its outcome, i.e. the handwriting or

scripta constituting the copied text. Pierre de Liffol

produced his books primarily for clients in the

service of Charles VI of France, though the

iconographical emphasis of at least one book

testifies to a client with pro-English sympathies. In

every case, though, the texts were copied from

exemplars whose contents were unlikely to offend

either camp. The work of copying the text of the

Chronicles was typically carried out by two teams of

three scribes to whose workshops the unbound

quires were sent by Pierre de Liffol (before being

sent on in turn to the Giac and Boethius Masters for

illustration and decoration). Scholars call the scribes

‘F’, ‘B’ and ‘D’, so anonymous are they.

Palaeographers have traditionally built up an idea of

scribal ‘personalities’ by singling out and describing

the distinguishing features of particular hands.

Scholars have in this way adduced significant

characteristics on which to found their conclusions:

particular ways of executing certain sequences of

letters (e.g. the consonant clusters ‘th’, ‘ch’, or the

group ‘-ent’) or certain recurring, distinctive ways of

writing an ‘a’ or ‘r’ (against models furnished by

contemporary bookhands as taught to all apprentice

scribes). The DID-ARQ archive comprises, as noted

above, ten virtual manuscripts, each containing

~300,000 words and all copied in varieties of a

bookhand known as littera cursiva libraria.

In due course, DID-ARQ began to test some of

the hypotheses adduced by palaeographers (using

more traditional modes of scholarship) against the

virtual dataset, applying algorithms described below.

The key research question (broadly formulated)

underpinning the team’s research was:

How might one adduce pertinent e-Science

methodologies for the interrogation of such a large-

scale database, the better to explore, characterise and

circumscribe particular manifestations (individual

scribal hands ‘F’, ‘B’ or ‘D’…) of an attested early

-century bookhand, littera cursiva libraria?

Traditional scholarship by palaeographers over

several generations suggested that it would be

fruitful to compare letter and word clusters across

several hundreds of digitised folios of writing as

realised by a particular scribe such as Hand F, for

instance, using semi-automated definition of the

perimeters of letter and word shapes; this, it was

postulated, should bring new scientific light to bear

upon the hypotheses of traditional palaeographers. It

should, in particular, generate augmented – and

arguably more objective – evidence towards

assignment to a particular scribe of responsibility for

given sections of a given manuscript, ‘X’.

Palaeography is acknowledged to be, in some

respects, an intuitive ‘science’ based on eye-brain

coordination, dependent to at least some extent on

the individual skills, experience and perceptive

acuity of individual practitioners. The application to

the sample corpus of our e-Science algorithms, it

was thought, might generate more objectively

quantifiable results.

Once Hand F’s written ‘idiolect’ had been more

precisely defined in the manner described, it ought

to become possible to search for and identify his or

her activity across other manuscripts such as ‘Y’ or

‘Z’. Palaeographers had already adduced some

professional evidence to suggest that this kind of

migration was happening across the volumes of the

Pierre de Liffol corpus; it was our expectation that

more accurate methodologies applied to the virtual

manuscripts might confirm these relatively more

intuitive hypotheses, and account for them on the

basis of more overtly scientific evidence. Potentially

rich areas for electronic investigation included the

ductus (the kinetic movement and direction of the

hand and pen as they make their marks, their upward

and downward strokes and curves) as realised by a

particular scribe, the overall neatness of the

particular folio, the (characteristic) recourse by a

scribe to abbreviations, and their deployment of

particular spelling patterns.

5.4 Maps, Quilts and Manuscripts

Work done by other members of the DID-ARQ team

(at Illinois and Michigan) on the French and English

maps and quilt collections yielded other potential

ways of querying the virtual manuscripts’ artists

hands (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Analysing Manuscripts and Maps.

Looking next at the scribal hands, DID-ARQ project

members extracted a ‘digital fingerprint’ for each of

the medieval copyists, using Polygonal Models and

Shape Recognition algorithms. Sobel Edge detection

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269

(using the Image2Learn API) was applied to source

images accessed from commonly-shared samples

mounted on the project’s Medici image library. Line

segments were then fitted to edge map data using the

expectation-maximisation (EM) algorithm. Shape

Recognition algorithms were applied to polygonal

models to identify letters, words, symbols and

patterns in the manuscripts’ texts (Figure 4). First

results proved encouraging. At time of writing,

preparations are in hand for further work involving

the running of the same algorithms on NCSA’s

Petascale HPC machine Blue Waters, or on the NSF

Teragrid’s HPC resources. The computation takes

many hours of computing time. Preliminary results

appear to promise that over coming months the

potential for identifying a steadily more objective

digital fingerprint for some of our hitherto shadowy

medieval copyists, Hands F, C and D, may evolve

into a firmer reality.



Figure 4: Identifying Letters and Words.

6 CONCLUSIONS

Humanities scholars are increasingly engaged with

the world of computing, whilst scientists working in

e-Science and Pervasive Informatics are becoming

equally fascinated by the fresh opportunities opening

up for work that may generate purposive new bonds

between what C.P. Snow labelled in his celebrated

1959 Reid Lecture the ‘Two Cultures’ (Arts and the

Sciences).

Digitisation projects are important to research

libraries and conservators, and to scholars to whom

direct access cannot always be given to original

manuscripts. They have a bearing also on the

development of genuinely pervasive ‘union’

interfaces deployable via electronic editions,

capable, like Virtual Vellum and the Online

Froissart, of bringing together for comparison

materials housed in discrete research libraries (many

of which unfortunately still insist, when federating

their virtual holdings, on retaining their own local

browsers – thereby limiting the pervasiveness of the

aggregated and shared material). Digitisation brings

huge benefits to museum and gallery visitors, where

specially designed software such as Kiosque allows

users to explore surrogates of books sealed in fixed

position within a glazed case, or to create

customised pathways through displayed material.

Image data can also be mined using techniques

developed by imaging and computing specialists;

exciting results are being generated in the process.

This paper has sought to demonstrate in particular

how, in the domain of manuscript studies, the more

traditional methodologies of art connoisseurship and

palaeography can benefit from the application to

their objects of study of Sobel Edge and Polygonal

Shape Fitting algorithms (derived in turn from

research on manuscripts, maps and quilts).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors acknowledge with gratitude the support

of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the

British Academy (UK), the CNRS (France) and the

NSF/NEH/JISC (“Digging into Data” program: NSF

grant ID: 1039385, and NSF ITS 09-10562 EAGER

grants). The authors also gratefully acknowledge the

contribution made to aspects of the research

described above by colleagues at the Universities of

Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Plymouth (respectively

Jim Laidlaw, Tony Lodge and Charlie Mansfield),

the Université de Nancy 2, Laboratoire ATILF,

Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (Sylvie Bazin,

Hiltrude Gerner and Gilles Souvay), the Humanities

Research Institute, University of Sheffield (Jamie

McLaughlin), and the French Section, SOCLAS,

University of Liverpool (Godfried Croenen).

Thanks are also due to Besançon Public Library,

Stonyhurst College, the Bibliothèque nationale de

France, the Musée national de l’Armée (Paris), and

the Royal Armouries, UK, as also to Chris Rust,

Centre for Creative Design, Sheffield Hallam

University. Special thanks go to digital photographer

Colin Dunn of Scriptura Ltd, and to Sara Mack,

calligrapher.

The work presented in this paper is a collective

effort of the following contributors from the

University of Sheffield, NCSA, UIUC, MATRIX,

MSUM, and University of South Carolina: Peter

Ainsworth, Michael Meredith; Peter Bajcsy, Rob

Kooper, Luigi Marini, Tenzing Shaw; Anne D.

Hedeman, Robert Markley, Michael Simeone,

Natalie Hanson, Heather Tennison, Simon

Appleford; Jennifer Guiliano; Dean Rehberger,

Justine Richardson, Matthew Geimer, Zachary

Pepin, Steve M. Cohen; Marsha MacDowell, Mary

Worrall, Amanda Sikarskie, Beth Donaldson;

Alhaad Gokhale.

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After close on two years of endeavour the DID-

ARQ team feels entitled to lay its own modest claim

to Aristotle’s dictum in the Metaphysica about the

whole becoming ‘more than the sum of its parts’.

The DID-ARQ project description and the visual

materials pertinent to each dataset can be found on

the three project websites:

NCSA/UIUC:

http://isda.ncsa.uiuc.edu/DID/index.html

MSU:

http://projects.matrix.msu.edu/did

University of Sheffield:

http://www.hridigital.co.uk/did

REFERENCES

[All websites cited in this paper accessed 26 July 2011.]

The Online Froissart: http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/

onlinefroissart

Kiosque: http://www.shef.ac.uk/hri/projects/projectpages/

kiosque/overview.html

Virtual Vellum: http://www.shef.ac.uk/hri/projects/

projectpages/virtualvellum.html

Image Spatial Data Analysis Group:

http://isda.ncsa.uiuc.edu/

Image2Learn: http://isda.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Im2Learn

Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social

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National Center for Supercomputing Applications:

http://ncsa.illinois.edu

University of Illinois Libraries:

http://www.library.illinois.edu

MATRIX: http://www.matrix.msu.edu

Quilt Index: http://www.quiltindex.org

MSU Museum: http://www.museum.msu.edu

Humanities Research Institute:

http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/hri

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