Medieval Studies Commons^™

Modelling Medieval Hands: Practical Ocr For Caroline Minuscule, Brandon Hawk, Antonia Karaisl, Nick White

Faculty Publications

This article presents the results of a series of experiments with open-source neural network OCR software on a total of 88 medieval manuscripts ranging from the ninth through thirteenth centuries.[5] Our scope in these experiments focused mainly on manuscripts written in Caroline minuscule, as well as a handful of test cases toward the end of our date range written in what may be called “Late Caroline” and “Early Gothic” scripts (termed “transitional” when taken together).[6] In the following, we discuss the possibilities and challenges of using OCR on medieval manuscripts, neural network technology and its use in OCR …