Historical Manuscripts Research Articles

Decryption of historical manuscripts: the DECRYPT project

Many historians and linguists are working individually and in an uncoordinated fashion on the identification and decryption of historical ciphers. This is a time-consuming process as they often work without access to automatic methods and processes that can accelerate the decipherment. At the same time, computer scientists and cryptologists are developing algorithms to decrypt various cipher types without having access to a large number of original ciphertexts. In this paper, we describe the DECRYPT project aiming at the creation of resources and tools for historical cryptology by bringing the expertise of various disciplines together for collecting data, exchanging methods for faster progress to transcribe, decrypt and contextualize historical encrypted manuscripts. We present our goals and work-in progress of a general approach for analyzing historical encrypted manuscripts using standardized methods and a new set of state-of-the-art tools. We release the data and tools as open-source hoping that all mentioned disciplines would benefit and contribute to the research infrastructure of historical cryptology.

Feature-extraction methods for historical manuscript dating based on writing style development

Paleographers and philologists perform significant research in finding the dates of ancient manuscripts to understand the historical contexts. To estimate these dates, the traditional process of using classical paleography is subjective, tedious, and often time-consuming. An automatic system based on pattern recognition techniques that infers these dates would be a valuable tool for scholars. In this study, the development of handwriting styles over time in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of ancient manuscripts, is used to create a model that predicts the date of a query manuscript. In order to extract the handwriting styles, several dedicated feature-extraction techniques have been explored. Additionally, a self-organizing time map is used as a codebook. Support vector regression is used to estimate a date based on the feature vector of a manuscript. The date estimation from grapheme-based technique outperforms other feature-extraction techniques in identifying the chronological style development of handwriting in this study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Historical document layout analysis using anisotropic diffusion and geometric features

There are several digital libraries worldwide which maintain valuable historical manuscripts. Usually, digital copies of these manuscripts are offered to researchers and readers in raster-image format. These images carry several document degradations that may hinder automatic information retrieval solutions such as manuscript indexing, categorization, retrieval by content, etc. In this paper, we propose a learning-free and hybrid document layout analysis for handwritten historical manuscripts. It has two main phases: page characterization and segmentation. First, the proposed method locates main-content initially using top-down whitespace analysis. It employs anisotropic diffusion filtering to find whitespaces. Then, it extracts template features representing manuscripts’ authors writing behavior. After that, moving windows are used to scan the manuscript page and define main-content boundaries more precisely. We evaluated the proposed method on two datasets: One set is publicly available with 38 historical manuscript pages, and the other set of 51 historical manuscript pages that are collected from the online Harvard Library. Experiments on both datasets show promising results in terms of segmentation quality of main-content that reaches up to 98.5% success rate.

Study of the influence of lexicon and language restrictions on computer assisted transcription of historical manuscripts

State-of-the-art Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems allow transcribers to speed-up the transcription of handwritten text images. These systems provide transcribers an initial draft transcription that can be corrected with less effort than transcribing the handwritten text images from scratch. Currently, even the draft transcriptions offered by the most advanced HTR systems contain errors. Therefore, the supervision of this draft by a human transcriber is still necessary to obtain the correct transcription of the handwritten text images. This supervision can be eased by using interactive and assistive transcription systems, where the transcriber and the automatic system cooperate in the amending process.In this paper, the draft transcription is provided by an HTR system based on Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks with Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory units, and the assistive system is fed by lattices generated by using Weighted Finite State Transducers. The influence of the lexicon and language restrictions on the performance of our computer assisted transcription system is evaluated on three historical manuscripts.The transcriptions offered by the proposed HTR system present very low error rates for the studied historical manuscripts. However, our assistive transcription system without lexicon or language restrictions is able to provide an additional reduction on the human effort required to correct the transcriptions in more than 50% over the transcriptions offered by the HTR system.

A Thousand Times Do it: Historical European Martial Arts and the Cultural Record

The following paper explores how intangible cultural knowledge is represented in the cultural record as information made known through physical objects. It seeks to prove that the preservation of intangible knowledge requires the continued practice of that knowledge as well as the creation of physical information. I believe that a study of European martial arts will demonstrate this. This paper will cover the history of historical European martial arts manuscripts in the early medieval period, relevant advances in manuscript making in the late medieval period, and the current revitalization of historical European martial arts. The paper will describe how communities of practitioners dedicated to recording guidelines for what can only be realized in practice and which is intangible knowledge, employ new technologies, ideas and metadata in creating a cultural record.

Document Image Binarization Using Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Networks

For document image analysis, image binarization is an important preprocessing step. Also, binarization can help in improving the readability of old and historical manuscripts. Such documents are generally degraded due to various reasons such as bleed-through, faded ink, or stains. Achieving good binarization performance on these documents is a challenging task. In this letter, a deep learning based model for document image binarization has been proposed, comprising a Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Network (DD-GAN) which uses Focal Loss as generator loss. The DD-GAN consists of two discriminator networks - one looks for the global similarity i.e. on the whole image, and another one explores the image in small patches i.e. local similarity. At the final stage, simple thresholding is performed on the generated images. The method has been tested on five recent DIBCO datasets. It has been found that the method is robust and it provides results comparable with state-of-the-art methods. The code for this letter is available at https://github.com/anuran-Chakraborty/BinarizationDualDiscriminatorGAN .

From under the elbow to pointing to the palm: Chinese metaphors for learning medicine by the book (fourth–fourteenth centuries)

AbstractThis article focuses on transformations in the main metaphors in ancient to late medieval titles of Chinese medical books used to convey to potential readers their ‘learning-by-the-book’ contents. It finds that in contrast to the European preference for hand metaphors in the genre terms – enchiridions, manuals and handbooks – the Chinese medical archive preserves bodily metaphors within which the hand metaphor appears only rarely in the early medieval period and is then superseded by metaphors that rely on the fingers and palms more than the hands per se. This longue durée survey from roughly the fourth to the fourteenth centuries of the wide-ranging metaphors for ‘handy medical books’ places their historical emergence and transformation within the history of Chinese medical manuscripts and printed texts. Metaphors in medical titles conveyed to potential readers at the time significant textual innovations in how medical knowledge would be presented to them. For later historians, they provide evidence of profound changes in managing an increasingly complex and expanding archive of Chinese medical manuscripts and printed texts. Innovations in textual reorganization intended to facilitate ‘learning by the book’ were often creatively captured in an illuminating range of genre distinctions, descriptors and metaphors.

Ibadi Muslims of North Africa: Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition by Paul M. Love, Jr.

Reviewed by: Ibadi Muslims of North Africa: Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition by Paul M. Love, Jr. Amanda Propst Keywords Manuscript Studies, North Africa, Ibadism, biographical tradition, network analysis, prosopography Paul M. Love, Jr. Ibadi Muslims of North Africa: Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018 228 pp. + 27 b/w illustrations, 1 map. $105. ISBN: 9781108472500. In Ibadi Muslims of North Africa, Paul M. Love, Jr., explores the interaction between the past and the present in the history of Ibadi manuscripts. By contextualizing and mapping the networks present within and around five major North African Ibadi prosopographical works, he provides a novel perspective on the way that the Maghribi Ibadis used these collections of biographies and anecdotes to define their own communities and histories. Methodologically, Love contributes to the study of the history of Islam and the narrower field of Ibadi studies by using the tools of network analysis, and this innovative use of these digital tools to revisit well-known and significant Ibadi texts is, on its own, valuable. However, Love does not merely make a case for applying this method to our field; he sets this data-focused approach alongside a more traditional narrative study of the texts and their social and historical contexts, creating a model that might be exported to similar studies in other theological and sectarian traditions. Ibadi Islam consists of two main population centers, one in the Mashriq, the East (the Omani Ibadis), and one in the Maghrib, the West, with communities dispersed across North Africa. This pronounced geographical separation led to some significant differences between the two populations. One of these is the focus of this book: the siyar (singular sira). While in the East, the siyar referred to letters and opinions exchanged among the scholars, in the West, the term came to refer to a highly developed tradition of collections of anecdotal and biographical passages about important individuals—that is, prosopographies (Prologue, xx). The reason for Love's choice of this genre of literature for a study of this kind is clear; these prosopographical works enjoyed a wide distribution and influence that resulted [End Page 206] from the geographically dispersed educational networks of students and scholars facilitated by trade across the Sahara. The importance and prevalence of the siyar in the Maghrib is the basis for Love's argument that through their contents and the circumstances of their perpetuation and distribution, these books worked to both construct and maintain the Ibadi identity and the boundaries of the Ibadi communities in North Africa during the time of their creation in the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries CE as well as the following centuries through their continued importance in the tradition. Throughout his book, Love centers the discussion on the prosopographical books themselves; the scholars who both appear within their contents and who wrote and distributed them are the means by which the books play their role in the "construction and maintenance" of the Ibadi identity. By centering his book on the histories of these texts themselves, Love contributes to the understudied aspect of material culture in the field of Ibadi, and, more widely, Islamic, studies. The book begins and ends with the present day: Love's own observation of contemporary Tunisian Ibadi conferences about the siyar in 2014 and 2015, which provides valuable context. In the introduction and first chapter, he gives the relevant Ibadi historical narrative and a description of the methods of network analysis he used. Here and in the sections on network analysis throughout the book, Love provides enough information about the specific methods he used from network analysis to spark a reader's interest in this approach without alienating the reader looking only for his historical conclusions. Network analysis—in Love's case, recording the instances of in-person interaction described within the content of the texts using the network mapping software Gephi—allowed him to visualize the links between scholars that existed across time and space. These visualizations and the structures they revealed represented relationships within the books, but not the relationships that surrounded the actual manuscripts, so to conceptualize the metadata associated...

Challenges in Proofing of the Cyrillic MCVRO Resources – Equability between the Technical Component and the Role of the Researcher

The OCR process is a complex one and with interdisciplinary implications. This paper deals with old historical religious manuscripts and old books to offer solutions for the digitalization process. A high rate of success in the OCR process will help researchers from various fields to use relevant content and to value it in their research. When a research in the field of theology or history is conducted, there are many issues, especially when trying to access old manuscripts. There is no digitalized content to access old Romanian manuscripts and researchers need to learn specific old writing. The focus of the present study is on the problematic technical aspects that we encountered in our attempt to establish the equilibrium ratio between the instruments for the capitalization of the information and the contribution of the specialists in such research studies.

Erratum: "Inter-Host Transmission of Carbapenemase-Producing Escherichia coli among Humans and Backyard Animals".

Vol. 128, No. 1 ErratumOpen AccessErratum: “Inter-Host Transmission of Carbapenemase-Producing Escherichia coli among Humans and Backyard Animals”is correction ofInter-host Transmission of Carbapenemase-Producing Escherichia coli among Humans and Backyard Animals Jiyun Li, Zhenwang Bi, Shizhen Ma, Baoli Chen, Chang Cai, Junjia He, Stefan Schwarz, Chengtao Sun, Yuqing Zhou, Jia Yin, Anette Hulth, Yongqiang Wang, Zhangqi Shen, Shaolin Wang, Congming Wu, Lennart E. Nilsson, Timothy R. Walsh, Stefan Börjesson, Jianzhong Shen, Qiang Sun, and Yang Wang Jiyun Li Search for more papers by this author , Zhenwang Bi Search for more papers by this author , Shizhen Ma Search for more papers by this author , Baoli Chen Search for more papers by this author , Chang Cai Search for more papers by this author , Junjia He Search for more papers by this author , Stefan Schwarz Search for more papers by this author , Chengtao Sun Search for more papers by this author , Yuqing Zhou Search for more papers by this author , Jia Yin Search for more papers by this author , Anette Hulth Search for more papers by this author , Yongqiang Wang Search for more papers by this author , Zhangqi Shen Search for more papers by this author , Shaolin Wang Search for more papers by this author , Congming Wu Search for more papers by this author , Lennart E. Nilsson Search for more papers by this author , Timothy R. Walsh Search for more papers by this author , Stefan Börjesson Search for more papers by this author , Jianzhong Shen Search for more papers by this author , Qiang Sun Search for more papers by this author , and Yang Wang Search for more papers by this author Published:3 January 2020CID: 019001https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP6660Cited by:1AboutSectionsPDF Supplemental Materials ToolsDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InReddit The Code and Data Supplemental Material file was inadvertently omitted when this paper was originally published. The file is included with this erratum.EHP regrets this error.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited by Mitman S, Amato H, Saraiva-Garcia C, Loayza F, Salinas L, Kurowski K, Marusinec R, Paredes D, Cárdenas P, Trueba G, Graham J and Quansah R (2022) Risk factors for third-generation cephalosporin-resistant and extended-spectrum β-lactamase-producing Escherichia coli carriage in domestic animals of semirural parishes east of Quito, Ecuador, PLOS Global Public Health, 10.1371/journal.pgph.0000206, 2:3, (e0000206) Related articlesInter-host Transmission of Carbapenemase-Producing Escherichia coli among Humans and Backyard Animals23 October 2019Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 128, No. 1 January 2020Metrics About Article Metrics Publication History Manuscript received11 December 2019Manuscript accepted12 December 2019Originally published3 January 2020 Financial disclosuresPDF download License information EHP is an open-access journal published with support from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health. All content is public domain unless otherwise noted. Note to readers with disabilities EHP strives to ensure that all journal content is accessible to all readers. However, some figures and Supplemental Material published in EHP articles may not conform to 508 standards due to the complexity of the information being presented. If you need assistance accessing journal content, please contact [email protected]. Our staff will work with you to assess and meet your accessibility needs within 3 working days.

From Oak Woods and Swamps: The Butterflies Recorded in Georgia by John Abbot (1751-C.1840) Based on His Drawings and Specimens

Despite numerous references to his drawings in the literature, the actual number of butterfly species that English artist-naturalist John Abbot (1751-c.1840) recorded in Georgia was unknown. As part of an exhaustive study spanning nearly 20 years, several thousand of Abbot's insect and bird drawings were examined. This includes a newly rediscovered collection of insect life history watercolors that Abbot sold to Heinrich Escher-Zollikofer, 20 of which were used for illustrations in the book Histoire Generale et Iconographie des Lepidopteres et des Chenilles de l'Amerique Septentrionale by Boisduval and Le Conte (1829-[1837]). Many of Abbot's figures that were used for this book were overpainted by Charles Emile Blanchard. Also recently discovered is an unusual series of Abbot's drawings that almost entirely portray early stages of insects, mostly Lepidoptera. Each collection of Abbot's insect drawings is detailed, and the butterflies they portray are documented. Examples from most collections are figured. Abbot's species names and abundance observations are given, and his duplicate compositions are chronologically tabulated. Historical books and manuscripts that figure (or may figure) Abbot's specimens are cited, as are more recent publications that include photographs of his butterfly drawings. Insect collections that are known to contain Abbot's specimens are summarized, and known (or suspected) specimens are listed by species. Based on these findings, Abbot recorded at least 107 species of butterflies in eastern Georgia, but another 29 species have been recorded in the region since his lifetime. Some additional details about the production of Smith and Abbot (1797) are also presented.

Methodological aspects of studying the history of Soviet cinema in the 1930s

The article is devoted to the history of the Russian film studies and methodology of film history as science using the example of the Introduction of History of the Soviet Film Art by Nikolai Iezuitov (18991941), one of the founders of the national film studies. Since the manuscript of History of the Soviet Film Art the first history of the Soviet cinema has not yet been published and introduced into scholarly use, the author pays special attention to archival sources.
 Despite a number of essays and discussions about film history and its methodology, a fundamental scholarly work on the historiography of the history of Soviet and Russian cinema has not yet been written. The relevance and novelty of the article is that it is based on the study of archival manuscripts of Nikolai Iezuitov. The exploration of early approaches to the study of the history of the Soviet cinema is important both historically and pedagogically.
 One of the most important sources of the concept of film history at an early stage of the national film studies is Iezuitov's Introduction to History of the Soviet Film Art. The Introduction is valuable because: 1) it is a rare evidence of reflection on the foundations of film history as scholarship and its methodology; 2) it is given by the author of the first history of the Soviet cinema; 3) it is represented by the author not as a separate abstract essay but as a part of the history itself.
 The Introduction defines the scholarly tasks and content of film history; overviews foreign books on the history of cinema; emphasizes specific periods of Soviet film history; and indicates the principles of work with relevant sources.
 Iezuitovs main principles in relation to film history are established in connection, firstly, with Soviet history scholarship; and secondly, with the vision of film history as the history of film art. Thus, film history, according to Iezuitov, is the unity of Marxist understanding of history and art-historical (stylistic) analysis of films and the main film movements in Soviet cinema.

The one text in the many: separate and composite readings of an Early Chinese historical manuscript

AbstractThe manuscript carrying the titleZhuangwang ji Cheng莊王既成, from the Shanghai Museum corpus of bamboo slips, bears two related anecdotes concerning the early Chinese monarch King Zhuang of Chu. In this article, we translate both stories and offer interpretations of them both as individual texts and as a composite narrative, situating both readings in a context of intertextual references based on shared cultural memory. Approaching the anecdotes together, we argue, generates an additional layer of meaning, yielding both a deep sense of dramatic irony and a critique of the value of foreknowledge – and, by extension, of the explanatory value of historiography. In detailing how this layer of meaning is generated, we explore the range of reading experiences and approaches to understanding the past enabled by combining separate but related textual units, a prevalent mode of composition and consumption in the manuscript culture of Warring States China.

Lichenometric dating of coseismic rockfall related to the Great Lisbon Earthquake in 1755 affecting the archaeological site of "Tolmo de Minateda" (Spain)

Dating earthquake geological effects associated with historical earthquakes gives us relevant information for estimating the seismic acceleration value experienced in the ground. Historical manuscripts describing earthquakes and its effects help to assign a seismic intensity about the ground motion. In this context, lichenometry represents a good semi-quantitative method for dating exposed rock surfaces related to earthquake phenomena. In this work, we have carried out a lichenometry analysis for dating a large rockfall located 700 km from the epicentre of the Great Lisbon Earthquake, which occurred in 1755 CE and which was probably triggered by the surface shaking, according to the historical transcripts. A rock mobilization of about 2300 m 3 was caused by the earthquake, the largest historical earthquake affecting Western Europe (estimated magnitude of M 8.5, and close to 100,000 fatalities). The macroseismic intensity of the geological and environmental effects ESI07 estimated ranges between VI and VII, in contrast to the attributed European Macroseismic scale EMS98 of V from other studies. The EMS98 estimation was derived from a contemporaneous document of 1756 CE, describing the earthquake effects in buildings and environmental effects throughout the entire Kingdom of Spain. Aspicilia radiosa was used as the lichen species for dating purposes, and the annual growth-curve was estimated as 0.25 mm/yr as a linear growth rate. The resulting age for 19 analyzed blocks was 1733 CE, for the oldest lichen measured on the block side related to the broken-face. The error was estimated in 33 years based upon the comparison between the observed thalli and the calculated values from the linear fitting. The delayed time for lichen colonization was not estimated. Other error sources as lichen mortality, coalescence of thallus could ex- plain the deviation between the resulting lichen age and the earthquake occurrence.

Brian Stanley Smith (1932–2018)

Brian Smith, former County Archivist of Gloucestershire, Secretary of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, and Chairman of the Society of Archivists, died on 3 November 2018, aged 86. He...

Erratum: "Mortality Risk and Fine Particulate Air Pollution in a Large, Representative Cohort of U.S. Adults".

Vol. 127, No. 9 ErratumOpen AccessErratum: “Mortality Risk and Fine Particulate Air Pollution in a Large, Representative Cohort of U.S. Adults”is correction ofMortality Risk and Fine Particulate Air Pollution in a Large, Representative Cohort of U.S. Adults C. Arden Pope III, Jacob S. Lefler, Majid Ezzati, Joshua D. Higbee, Julian D. Marshall, Sun-Young Kim, Matthew Bechle, Kurtis S. Gilliat, Spencer E. Vernon, Allen L. Robinson, and Richard T. Burnett C. Arden Pope III Search for more papers by this author , Jacob S. Lefler Search for more papers by this author , Majid Ezzati Search for more papers by this author , Joshua D. Higbee Search for more papers by this author , Julian D. Marshall Search for more papers by this author , Sun-Young Kim Search for more papers by this author , Matthew Bechle Search for more papers by this author , Kurtis S. Gilliat Search for more papers by this author , Spencer E. Vernon Search for more papers by this author , Allen L. Robinson Search for more papers by this author , and Richard T. Burnett Search for more papers by this author Published:27 September 2019CID: 099002https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP6182Cited by:7AboutSectionsPDF ToolsDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InReddit In the final sentence of the Acknowledgments section, the sentence “Findings and conclusions of this research are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Research Data Center (RDC), the NCHS, the U.S. EPA, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” should be “Findings and conclusions of this research are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Research Data Center (RDC), the NCHS, the U.S. EPA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or Cornerstone Research.”The authors apologize for the error.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited by Thind M, Tessum C and Marshall J (2022) Environmental Health, Racial/Ethnic Health Disparity, and Climate Impacts of Inter-Regional Freight Transport in the United States, Environmental Science & Technology, 10.1021/acs.est.2c03646, 57:2, (884-895), Online publication date: 17-Jan-2023. Wu Y, Xu Z, Liu S, Tang M and Lu S (2022) Emission Characteristics of Particulate Matter from Coal-Fired Power Units with Different Load Conditions, Water, Air, & Soil Pollution, 10.1007/s11270-022-05919-9, 233:11, Online publication date: 1-Nov-2022. Jun Y, Song I, Kim O and Kim S (2022) Impact of limited residential address on health effect analysis of predicted air pollution in a simulation study, Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, 10.1038/s41370-022-00412-1, 32:4, (637-643), Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022. Cano M, Reina T, Portillo E, Gallego Fernández L and Navarrete B (2021) Characterization of emissions of condensable particulate matter under real operation conditions in cement clinker kilns using complementary experimental techniques, Science of The Total Environment, 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.147472, 786, (147472), Online publication date: 1-Sep-2021. Kataoka H, Tanaka K, Tazuya-Murayama K, Yamashita T and Nishikawa J (2021) Cytotoxic Effects of Water-Soluble Extracts of Coarse and Fine Atmospheric Particulate Matter on Mast Cell Lines, Biological and Pharmaceutical Bulletin, 10.1248/bpb.b20-00576, 44:1, (57-62), Online publication date: 1-Jan-2021. Ou J, Hanson H, Ramsay J, Kaddas H, Pope C, Leiser C, VanDerslice J and Kirchhoff A (2020) Fine Particulate Matter Air Pollution and Mortality among Pediatric, Adolescent, and Young Adult Cancer Patients, Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-19-1363, 29:10, (1929-1939), Online publication date: 1-Oct-2020. Coffman E, Burnett R and Sacks J (2020) Quantitative Characterization of Uncertainty in the Concentration–Response Relationship between Long-Term PM 2.5 Exposure and Mortality at Low Concentrations , Environmental Science & Technology, 10.1021/acs.est.0c02770 Related articlesMortality Risk and Fine Particulate Air Pollution in a Large, Representative Cohort of U.S. Adults24 July 2019Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 127, No. 9 September 2019Metrics About Article Metrics Publication History Manuscript received5 September 2019Manuscript accepted17 September 2019Originally published27 September 2019 Financial disclosuresPDF download License information EHP is an open-access journal published with support from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health. All content is public domain unless otherwise noted. Note to readers with disabilities EHP strives to ensure that all journal content is accessible to all readers. However, some figures and Supplemental Material published in EHP articles may not conform to 508 standards due to the complexity of the information being presented. If you need assistance accessing journal content, please contact [email protected]. Our staff will work with you to assess and meet your accessibility needs within 3 working days.

HWNet v2: an efficient word image representation for handwritten documents

We present a framework for learning an efficient holistic representation for handwritten word images. The proposed method uses a deep convolutional neural network with traditional classification loss. The major strengths of our work lie in: (i) the efficient usage of synthetic data to pre-train a deep network, (ii) an adapted version of the ResNet-34 architecture with the region of interest pooling (referred to as HWNet v2) which learns discriminative features for variable sized word images, and (iii) a realistic augmentation of training data with multiple scales and distortions which mimics the natural process of handwriting. We further investigate the process of transfer learning to reduce the domain gap between synthetic and real domain and also analyze the invariances learned at different layers of the network using visualization techniques proposed in the literature. Our representation leads to a state-of-the-art word spotting performance on standard handwritten datasets and historical manuscripts in different languages with minimal representation size. On the challenging iam dataset, our method is first to report an mAP of around 0.90 for word spotting with a representation size of just 32 dimensions. Furthermore, we also present results on printed document datasets in English and Indic scripts which validates the generic nature of the proposed framework for learning word image representation.

Staff, Symbol and Melody Detection of Medieval Manuscripts Written in Square Notation Using Deep Fully Convolutional Networks

Even today, the automatic digitisation of scanned documents in general, but especially the automatic optical music recognition (OMR) of historical manuscripts, still remains an enormous challenge, since both handwritten musical symbols and text have to be identified. This paper focuses on the Medieval so-called square notation developed in the 11th–12th century, which is already composed of staff lines, staves, clefs, accidentals, and neumes that are roughly spoken connected single notes. The aim is to develop an algorithm that captures both the neumes, and in particular its melody, which can be used to reconstruct the original writing. Our pipeline is similar to the standard OMR approach and comprises a novel staff line and symbol detection algorithm based on deep Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN), which perform pixel-based predictions for either staff lines or symbols and their respective types. Then, the staff line detection combines the extracted lines to staves and yields an F 1 -score of over 99% for both detecting lines and complete staves. For the music symbol detection, we choose a novel approach that skips the step to identify neumes and instead directly predicts note components (NCs) and their respective affiliation to a neume. Furthermore, the algorithm detects clefs and accidentals. Our algorithm predicts the symbol sequence of a staff with a diplomatic symbol accuracy rate (dSAR) of about 87%, which includes symbol type and location. If only the NCs without their respective connection to a neume, all clefs and accidentals are of interest, the algorithm reaches an harmonic symbol accuracy rate (hSAR) of approximately 90%. In general, the algorithm recognises a symbol in the manuscript with an F 1 -score of over 96%.

A new analytic framework for prediction of migration patterns and locations of historical manuscripts based on their script types

Abstract In this article, we utilized large-scale statistical analysis and data visualization techniques of the greatest collection in the world of Hebrew manuscript metadata records to develop a new methodology for quantitative investigation of the palaeographic, geographic, and temporal characteristics of historical manuscripts. The study aims to explore whether and to what extent the script type of the manuscript and its changes over time can be used to automatically predict and complete missing geospatial data of the manuscripts. To this end, various ontological entities were used as features to train supervised machine-learning algorithms to predict the places of writing of manuscripts which were often absent in the catalogue records. The obtained results show that while the script type as an only feature might not be sufficient for prediction of the location of the manuscript’s writing, its combination with temporal data of the manuscript yielded about 80% accuracy. Eventually, our system was able to complete the missing places of writing for over 60% of the manuscripts in the corpus. Moreover, we found that through typical and marginal script types in different regions and their changes over time, it is possible to draw the migration map of the Jewish communities over the centuries. This reinforces the findings of historical research on Jewish migration patterns and communal formation. For example, the waves of immigration from Western Europe can be seen clearly from the second half of the 13th century, which continued until the 17th century and greatly increased the Eastern European Jewish community.

Erratum: Prenatal and Childhood Traffic-Related Pollution Exposure and Childhood Cognition in the Project Viva Cohort (Massachusetts, USA).

Vol. 127, No. 6 ErratumOpen AccessErratum: Prenatal and Childhood Traffic-Related Pollution Exposure and Childhood Cognition in the Project Viva Cohort (Massachusetts, USA)is correction ofPrenatal and Childhood Traffic-Related Pollution Exposure and Childhood Cognition in the Project Viva Cohort (Massachusetts, USA) Maria H. Harris, Diane R. Gold, Sheryl L. Rifas-Shiman, Steven J. Melly, Antonella Zanobetti, Brent A. Coull, Joel D. Schwartz, Alexandros Gryparis, Itai Kloog, Petros Koutrakis, David C. Bellinger, Roberta F. White, Sharon K. Sagiv, and Emily Oken Maria H. Harris Search for more papers by this author , Diane R. Gold Search for more papers by this author , Sheryl L. Rifas-Shiman Search for more papers by this author , Steven J. Melly Search for more papers by this author , Antonella Zanobetti Search for more papers by this author , Brent A. Coull Search for more papers by this author , Joel D. Schwartz Search for more papers by this author , Alexandros Gryparis Search for more papers by this author , Itai Kloog Search for more papers by this author , Petros Koutrakis Search for more papers by this author , David C. Bellinger Search for more papers by this author , Roberta F. White Search for more papers by this author , Sharon K. Sagiv Search for more papers by this author , and Emily Oken Search for more papers by this author Published:10 June 2019CID: 069001https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP5476AboutSectionsPDF ToolsDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InReddit In the “Results” section, the first sentence under “Fine particulate matter (PM subscript 2.5PM2.5)” incorrectly states that “… an IQR increase in third-trimester PM subscript 2.5PM2.5 predicted slightly higher nonverbal IQ (0.9 points; 95% CI: negative 0.8–0.8, 2.5) (Table 3).” The sentence should indicate that “… an IQR increase in third-trimester PM2.5 predicted slightly higher visual motor skills (0.9 points; 95% CI: negative 0.8–0.8, 2.5) (Table 3).” The corresponding data in Table 3 are correct as shown. The authors regret the error.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsRelated articlesPrenatal and Childhood Traffic-Related Pollution Exposure and Childhood Cognition in the Project Viva Cohort (Massachusetts, USA)3 April 2015Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 127, No. 6 June 2019Metrics About Article Metrics Publication History Manuscript received19 April 2019Manuscript revised11 May 2019Manuscript accepted13 May 2019Originally published10 June 2019 Financial disclosuresPDF download License information EHP is an open-access journal published with support from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health. All content is public domain unless otherwise noted. Note to readers with disabilities EHP strives to ensure that all journal content is accessible to all readers. However, some figures and Supplemental Material published in EHP articles may not conform to 508 standards due to the complexity of the information being presented. If you need assistance accessing journal content, please contact [email protected]. Our staff will work with you to assess and meet your accessibility needs within 3 working days.