Abstract
To understand the historical context of an ancient manuscript, scholars rely on the prior knowledge of writer and date of that document. In this paper, we study the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of ancient manuscripts
with immense historical, religious, and linguistic significance, which was discovered in the mid-20th century near the Dead Sea. Most of the manuscripts of this collection have become digitally available only recently and techniques from the pattern recognition field can be applied to revise existing hypotheses on the writers
and dates of these scrolls. This paper presents our ongoing work which aims to introduce digital palaeography to the field and generate fresh empirical data by means of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. Challenges
in analyzing the Dead Sea Scrolls are highlighted by a pilot experiment identifying the writers using several dedicated features. Finally, we discuss whether to use specifically-designed shape features for writer identification or to use the Deep Learning methods on a relatively limited ancient manuscript collection which
is degraded over the course of time and is not labeled, as in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
with immense historical, religious, and linguistic significance, which was discovered in the mid-20th century near the Dead Sea. Most of the manuscripts of this collection have become digitally available only recently and techniques from the pattern recognition field can be applied to revise existing hypotheses on the writers
and dates of these scrolls. This paper presents our ongoing work which aims to introduce digital palaeography to the field and generate fresh empirical data by means of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. Challenges
in analyzing the Dead Sea Scrolls are highlighted by a pilot experiment identifying the writers using several dedicated features. Finally, we discuss whether to use specifically-designed shape features for writer identification or to use the Deep Learning methods on a relatively limited ancient manuscript collection which
is degraded over the course of time and is not labeled, as in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM, 693-702, 2017, Porto, Portugal |
| Pages | 693-702 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2017 |
| Event | International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods 2017 - Porto, Portugal Duration: 24-Feb-2017 → 26-Feb-2017 |
Conference
| Conference | International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods 2017 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Portugal |
| City | Porto |
| Period | 24/02/2017 → 26/02/2017 |