A New Tool for Computer Assisted Paleography: The Digital Analysis of Syriac Handwriting Project

Abstract

Abstract Over the last nine years, a forty-seven-person digital humanities project has explored the feasibility of computer assisted paleography for Syriac. That is, could one use big data, visual analytics, and recent advances in the digital analysis of handwriting to better understand Syriac manuscripts and Syriac manuscript culture? Last June we launched the public-facing part of our project titled the “Digital Analysis of Syriac Handwriting” or DASH (dash.Stanford.edu). DASH consists of digital page images from 90% of the world’s surviving Syriac manuscripts securely dated to before the twelfth century, as well as 90,000 individually trimmed letters from these manuscripts. In addition to introducing this tool to scholars of Syriac, this article presents a series of novel visualization tools that can also serve as a starting point for digital paleography projects in other linguistic traditions.