Using eScriptorium to work on documents: eScriptorium applied on a 13th century French cartulary

Abstract

As part of the research on Digital Diplomatics or on new tools usable in Diplomatics’ studies, this essay discusses the experience of treating a 13th century French cartulary with eScriptorium. By analyzing the functioning of this open-source software created mainly for the automatic transcription of any type of document, in any language and on any medium, we will see step by step its application on the the Saint-Etienne-des-Grès church’s cartulary. If the starting hypothesis proposed the software’s use for the analysis of both internal and external features on the one hand and on the other the experimentation of several HTR models on a document tipology which by nature can include a great variety of different scripts, such as in this case, the work proved satisfactory for the recognition of the external features of the document and a good result was achieved in terms of automatic transcription. As far as the analysis of the internal features is concerned, it is currently not possible to carry it out directly on the software. ​​​​​​​By the way, at this stage the work one does on eScriptorium can be exported and then transformed into TEI, taking into account that the eScriptorium team is working on the integration of the TEI’s principles into the tool, promising good results in the near future.