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Scribal Handwriting

Background of the Project

Scribal Handwriting is an image-processing Web App that is aimed at researchers at the British Library working on ancient manuscript. Paleographers, researchers that study ancient handwritings, perform manual comparison between similar characters of documents to link common handwriting features, such as typeface of character, size or ink to the creator of that document.

The goal of Scribal Handwriting is to create an application that provides an automated alternative to the lengthy and repetitive process of document analysis using an image processing algorithm.

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Our Proposed Solution

Our solution consists of a responsive Web App that allow the user to conduct character search across a collection of documents. Furthermore, it permits the user to create a Manuscript collection, by importing documents to the Web App and later viewing them using the login system.

Achievements

The major achievements that this project accomplished can be summarized with:

  • A working solution to manuscript analysis, offering an automated and simple to use companion tool for researchers

  • Increased portability, thanks to the possibility of performing off-site research using the Manuscript Collection feature;

  • Effective document damage removal, thanks to the use of the thresholding script created as part of the project

Key Features

The main features of our application include:

  • Responsive Web App, offering a design that scales depending on the platform

  • User Login/Registration, allowing the user to create and manage their account

  • Manuscript Collection creation, permitting the user to view and upload their own manuscript

  • Character Search, allowing the user to search for a specific character across several manuscripts

  • Advanced Search Option, which allows the user to tweak the search to better suits their needs.

Presentation Video

Here a short presentation video of our project and the key functionalities of our Application. video

The Development Team

francesco
Francesco Benintende
Team-leader, Front End Developer, Chief of Deployment
francesco.benintende.16@ucl.ac.uk

andrei
Andrei Maxim
Researcher, Report Editor, Website Manager
andrei.maxim.16@ucl.ac.uk

kamil
Kamil Zajac Back End Developer, Deployment Curator, Tester kamil.zajac.16@ucl.ac.uk