Historical Manuscripts Research Articles

Queer environments: Reanimating ‘Adam Scrivyen’

Integrating queer theory and ecocriticism, this essay reassesses the historical manuscript contexts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s shortest poem, commonly known as ‘Adam Scriveyn,’ while also reconsidering the text’s varied afterlives in contemporary scholarship, including its manifestations in printed editions and digital media. Attending to the material transformations of the poem across time invites close scrutiny of the medieval homosocial networks of textual production, and Elizabeth Freeman’s critique of chrononormativity helps to illustrate how the poet Chaucer, the London scrivener Adam Pynkhurst, and early copyist John Shirley are ‘engrouped’ into a queer collective bound together by intimate forms of co-dependency. Queer relationality in turn structures the literary and affective networks that contemporary medievalists construct by means of the poem itself. Both manuscript scholars and literary critics enact what Carolyn Dinshaw calls a ‘queer touch’ across time, inhabiting a temporality that incorporates the text’s previous readers and editors and even the animal body that gave its life to produce the parchment upon which the orginary text was written. This analysis examines the visual presentation of Pynkhurst’s handwriting on the website Late Medieval English Scribes and interactive online interface of the collaborative project Networks of Book Makers, Owners and Users in Late Medieval England. Instantiating the ‘trans-corporeality’ and ‘distributed agency’ of ecotheorists Stacy Alaimo and Jane Bennett, digital media not only (re)animates textual objects but also demonstrates how texts circulate through networked environments by means of human participants and more-than-human forces.

Erratum: “A Novel Method for the Development of Environmental Public Health Indicators and Benchmark Dose Estimation Using a Health-Based Endpoint for Chlorpyrifos”

Vol. 126, No. 9 ErratumOpen AccessErratum: “A Novel Method for the Development of Environmental Public Health Indicators and Benchmark Dose Estimation Using a Health-Based Endpoint for Chlorpyrifos”is correction ofA Novel Method for the Development of Environmental Public Health Indicators and Benchmark Dose Estimation Using a Health-Based End Point for Chlorpyrifos Todd J. Zurlinden and Brad Reisfeld Todd J. Zurlinden Search for more papers by this author and Brad Reisfeld Search for more papers by this author Published:6 September 2018CID: 099001https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP4279AboutSectionsPDF ToolsDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InReddit The estimated exposure thresholds for RBC acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibition and plasma butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE) inhibition were listed incorrectly in the Results as “99% available RBC AChE, and 90% available plasma BuChE.” The correct values are 99.98% for available RBC AChE and 96.25% for available plasma BuChE.In addition, the RBC AChE level associated with a 15% cognitive deficit, based on data from Farahat et al. (2003), was derived incorrectly as BM sub RBC – AchE equals open parenthesis 100 minus 80 close parenthesis divided by 100 equals 0.20BMRBC–AChE=(100−80)/100=0.20. The correct value is BM sub RBC – AchE equals open parenthesis 100 minus 80 close parenthesis divided by 80 equals 0.25BMRBC–AChE=(100−80)/80=0.25. The estimate shown in the original Figure 5 for the level of BM sub AChEBMAChE associated with a 15% cognitive deficit in Farahat et al. (2003) also was incorrect. The corrected figure is included in this erratum.Figure 5. Predictions of human-specific cognitive deficits from measurable biomarkers of exposure. BM sub CPF, BM sub AChEBMCPF,BMAChE, and BM sub BuChEBMBuChE, are the independent biomarker of exposure variables for Equation 2 and correspond to peak plasma chlorpyrifos (CPF) concentration, minimum blood acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibition and minimum blood butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE) inhibition, respectively. Dashed lines represent 95% prediction intervals, and the solid circle (•) represents measured fractional cognitive deficit data from Farahat et al. (2003) using the differences in performance of the Benton Visual Retention Test between the exposed and unexposed groups and fractional plasma AChE activity from the reported plasma AChE activity.The authors confirm that these changes do not affect the study conclusions.The authors regret these errors.ReferenceFarahat TM, Abdelrasoul GM, Amr MM, Shebl MM, Farahat FM, Anger WK. 2003. Neurobehavioural effects among workers occupationally exposed to organophosphorous pesticides. Occup Environ Med 60(4):279–286, PMID: 12660376, 10.1136/oem.60.4.279. Crossref, Medline, Google ScholarFiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsRelated articlesA Novel Method for the Development of Environmental Public Health Indicators and Benchmark Dose Estimation Using a Health-Based End Point for Chlorpyrifos20 April 2018Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 126, No. 9 September 2018Metrics About Article Metrics Publication History Manuscript received1 August 2018Manuscript accepted1 August 2018Originally published6 September 2018 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.

Information extraction from historical handwritten document images with a context-aware neural model

Many historical manuscripts that hold trustworthy memories of the past societies contain information organized in a structured layout (e.g. census, birth or marriage records). The precious information stored in these documents cannot be effectively used nor accessed without costly annotation efforts. The transcription driven by the semantic categories of words is crucial for the subsequent access. In this paper we describe an approach to extract information from structured historical handwritten text images and build a knowledge representation for the extraction of meaning out of historical data. The method extracts information, such as named entities, without the need of an intermediate transcription step, thanks to the incorporation of context information through language models. Our system has two variants, the first one is based on bigrams, whereas the second one is based on recurrent neural networks. Concretely, our second architecture integrates a Convolutional Neural Network to model visual information from word images together with a Bidirecitonal Long Short Term Memory network to model the relation among the words. This integrated sequential approach is able to extract more information than just the semantic category (e.g. a semantic category can be associated to a person in a record). Our system is generic, it deals with out-of-vocabulary words by design, and it can be applied to structured handwritten texts from different domains. The method has been validated with the ICDAR IEHHR competition protocol, outperforming the existing approaches.

Momentous moment: Rediscovering Korean history through digitizing private letters

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the development of a digital archive for the Min Family Correspondence Collection of the University of Toronto Libraries, the first Korean historical manuscript collection in Canada. This strategic digitization project between the University of Toronto Libraries and the National Library of Korea accomplished the following: content analysis and annotation of manuscripts, metadata creation, and enhanced access to the resources. The results from this paper show that one of the crucial factors in successful digitization projects is building bridges between the two organizations as a partnership. Our main aim in this paper was to build a deeper understanding of how to develop a digital archive for Asian historical manuscripts and to explore how to improve the accessibility of rare historical records.

Minimally-destructive atmospheric ionisation mass spectrometry authenticates authorship of historical manuscripts

Authentic historic manuscripts fetch high sums, but establishing their authenticity is challenging, relies on a host of stylistic clues and requires expert knowledge. High resolution mass spectrometry has not, until now, been applied to guide the authentication of historic manuscripts. Robert Burns is a well-known Scottish poet, whose fame, and the eponymous ‘Burns Night’ are celebrated world-wide. Authenticity of his works is complicated by the ‘industrial’ production of fakes by Alexander Smith in the 1890s, many of which were of good quality and capable of fooling experts. This study represents the first analysis of the inks and paper used in Burns poetry, in a minimally destructive manner that could find application in many areas. Applying direct infusion mass spectrometry to a panel of selected authenticated Burns and Smith manuscripts, we have produced a Support Vector Machine classifier that distinguishes Burns from Smith with a 0.77 AUC. Using contemporary recipes for inks, we were also able to match features of each to the inks used to produce some of Burns’ original manuscripts. We anticipate the method and classifier having broad application in authentication of manuscripts, and our analysis of contemporary inks to provide insights into the production of written works of art.

What's New in Pediatric Hip?

Developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH), which encompasses a wide spectrum of disease from mild dysplasia to frank dislocation, is one of the most common developmental deformities of the lower extremities and one of the leading causes of future osteoarthritis and hip arthroplasty. Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease (LCPD) results from a vascular insult to the growing femoral epiphysis, which in turn can create permanent morphologic changes to the hip joint. Slipped capital femoral epiphysis (SCFE) occurs when the proximal femoral physis fails allowing the epiphysis to displace in relation to the metaphysis. Infections about the hip also create significant morbidity in the pediatric hip. We searched the PubMed database for all studies related to DDH, LCPD, SCFE, and pediatric hip infections that were published between July 1, 2014 and August 31, 2017. The search was limited to English articles and yielded 839 papers. This project was initiated by the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America Publications Committee and was reviewed and approved by the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America Presidential Line. A total of 40 papers were selected for review based upon new and significant findings. Select historical manuscripts are also included to provide sufficient background information. DDH, LCPD, SCFE, and infections about the hip continue to be important topics in pediatric orthopaedics and areas of vital research. This manuscript reviews the most important recent literature on the diagnosis and treatment of these pediatric hip conditions. Level V.

THE ‘IMPARTIALITY’ OF NARCISSUS LUTTRELL'S READING PRACTICES AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1679–1710

AbstractThis article explores the influence of ‘impartiality’ on reading practices, print culture, and historical writing in later Stuart Britain. It sheds new light on the most prolific collector of ‘cheap print’ during this period, Narcissus Luttrell (1657–1732), by assessing his reading practices in relation to the ideal of impartiality. Luttrell is analysed using his hitherto unstudied commonplace books and historical manuscript collection made in reaction to the Exclusion Crisis (1679–81) and the Glorious Revolution (1688). Their analysis demonstrates the way Luttrell used impartiality rhetorically to justify and express his whiggish judgement and interpretation of modern history. The article also highlights key continuities and differences between the early and later Stuart publics by connecting Luttrell to humanist rhetoric, earlier manuscript culture, and shifts in reading practices.

Grayification: A meaningful grayscale conversion to improve handwritten historical documents analysis

This paper presents an improvement of handwriting binarization techniques on colored historical documents. We introduce a novel preprocessing step into the usual document image analysis (DIA) workflow. Before binarization, we propose a grayification step to enhance the input image with the help of a new grayscale conversion algorithm, namely the grayification algorithm. This new algorithm uses luminance and color information to improve the contrast between the foreground and the background. Especially on documents with non-black ink and moreover with diverse colors, e.g., illuminations in historical manuscripts, we expect an increased performance. The binarization give then better results on this enhanced grayscale image, and in particular color text is binarized as well as black text. In fact, by adding a preprocessing step to enhance the input grayscale image, the results on all the following tasks of the analysis chain should be improved. This modification of the usual workflow of historical document analysis eases the binarization task as well as other following tasks like layout analysis, line segmentation, OCR, etc. We demonstrate the effects of our novel preprocessing technique on a set of challenging historical documents, which we make publicly available for research purpose, and two publicly available datasets. This improvement is illustrated in this paper on the binarization task, where the results of four different binarization methods are successfully improved.

Kawiryan Discourse as The Legitimacy of The Islamic Sultanate in Serat Saptastha

The purpose of writing this article is to analyze the discourse of heroism ( kawiryan ) according to Sultan Hamengkubuwana VII contained in the Serat Saptstha manuscript. It is a type of historical manuscript that provides an overview about the discourse stored in the content of the manuscript. The Sultan discussed in this article is Hamengkubuwana VII. He is an Islamic Sultan who ruled the societies in 1877-1921. His reign is in Keraton Ngayogyakarta (Ngayogyakarta Palace) and it is a kind of Islamic Sultanate. Based on the conclusion of this study, Hamengkubuwana VII as the King sent by God performed an image as a very humble sultan. The legitimacy of his power promotes an understanding of Islamic Sultanate represented by Hamengkubuwana VII. The representation of peaceful and serene life portrayed by Hamengkubuwana VII makes the image of Hamengkubuwana VII to be an irreplaceable sultan and his personality also inspires the societies in terms of the importance to always remember The Creator or on the other word is God.

Graph-based keyword spotting in historical manuscripts using Hausdorff edit distance

Keyword spotting enables content-based retrieval of scanned historical manuscripts using search terms, which, in turn, facilitates the indexation in digital libraries. Recent approaches include graph-based representations that capture the complex structure of handwriting. However, the high representational power of graphs comes at the cost of high computational complexity for graph matching. In this article, we investigate the potential of Hausdorff edit distance (HED) for keyword spotting. It is an efficient quadratic-time approximation of the graph edit distance. In a comprehensive experimental evaluation with four types of handwriting graphs and four benchmark datasets (George Washington, Parzival, Botany, and Alvermann Konzilsprotokolle), we demonstrate a strong performance of the proposed HED-based method when compared with the state of the art, both, in terms of precision and speed.

Automatic segmentation and reconstruction of historical manuscripts in gradient domain

Separating content from noise in historical manuscripts is a fundamental task in digital palaeography. This study presents a fully automated segmentation approach based on the response of Harris corner detectors. The strength and clustering efficiency of the detected corners in the manuscripts are evaluated and used to segment the content from the background and noise. In addition, a manuscript reconstruction technique is proposed from the gradient field using the Poisson method to guide the interpolation. This reconstruction is able to remove noise significantly and hence enhances the contrast of the content thus making it easier for users to read and process these documents. The proposed approaches are evaluated using various standard databases to highlight their effectiveness and robustness to a multitude of noise and writing styles. Subjective and objective evaluations of the experimental results show that these techniques are able to successfully segment and reconstruct a very diverse set of scanned documents. An analysis of the results has also shown that the proposed technique compares favourably against similar counterparts.

Count Karl von Zinzendorf on Joseph II’s New Taxation

Abstract The importance of financial issues in the central lands of the Austrian Monarchy in creating the critical situation which obtained by Joseph II’s death is well known. Central to these issues was the emperor’s attempt to recast the existing Contribution, the mainstay of Austrian direct taxation, into a single tax based solely on the produce of land and ending the need for other taxes. The present article amplifies and modifies the existing treatment of this still controversial subject, drawing principally on its manuscript History compiled by Count Karl von Zinzendorf, the emperor’s finance man and lead executive in the ‘revolutionary’ project. The article documents Zinzendorf’s admiring, but increasingly exasperated, view of the emperor, and the struggle between the two until Zinzendorf threw in the towel. It shows Zinzendorf’s view that from that point the tax plan came under radical leadership, and that in its final form in the Patent of 10 February 1789 it betrayed a wish by the emperor, urged by such advisers, to impoverish and weaken the nobility. It will be argued that it was Zinzendorf’s criticisms of Joseph’s plan, consistently put forward and consistently rejected, which formed the basis of the petition against it to Leopold II by the Estates of Lower Austria on 28 February 1790, and of the Patent of 6 April 1790 for Lower Austria by which Leopold accepted the grievances stated, and the remedy of total withdrawal proposed for them.

Erratum: "A Case-Control Study of Maternal Polybrominated Diphenyl Ether (PBDE) Exposure and Cryptorchidism in Canadian Populations".

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1289/EHP522.].

Erratum: "Estimated Changes in Life Expectancy and Adult Mortality Resulting from Declining PM2.5 Exposures in the Contiguous United States: 1980-2010".

[This corrects the article DOI: https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP507.].

Erratum: "Regulation of Chromatin Assembly and Cell Transformation by Formaldehyde Exposure in Human Cells".

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1289/EHP1275.].

Dyes and Dyeing in the Ming and Qing Dynasties in China: Preliminary Evidence Based on Primary Sources of Documented Recipes

Colour has long held a special significance in Chinese culture, especially for textiles in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) Dynasties, the period when imperial handicrafts reached their production peak. This paper makes the first attempt to compare systematically historical Chinese records of textile dyeing to understand its practice. The paper presents research into the dyes and dyeing methods recorded in four important historical manuscripts of dye recipes from the periods of interest by examining the range and frequency of dyes and dyeing methods using statistical analysis methods. Issues such as the reliability of the historical resources of dyeing, the combination of raw materials, factors affecting the choices of dyes and dyeing methods and advances in dyeing are discussed. The findings of this research significantly promote the knowledge of textile dyeing for historical Chinese textiles research. They also have important implications for the understanding of world textile dyeing history.

Byzantine Prayer Books as Sources for Social History and Daily Life

This multi-authored article presents a new project to study Byzantine prayer books (euchologia) by a team of scholars at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The long-term aim of the project is to create a census of all extant prayer book manuscripts for the use of priests in Greek up to the year 1650, in order to facilitate the study of the ‘occasional prayers’ as sources for daily life and social history. After an extended introduction to the history of scholarship and the methodological challenges encountered in the first three years of the project, the first two individual contributions highlight the importance of manuscript study in situ, by addressing issues of codicology and the history of manuscripts as evidenced in the liturgical commemorations they contain. The following three contributions demonstrate the value of the ‘small prayers’ as a largely untapped historical source through the study of prayers for changing religious affiliation, prayers for female purity in conjunction with childbirth, and prayers in the context of primary education.

De handschriften uit het klooster Mariënhage in Eindhoven. Een overzicht

As most religious institutions in the later Middle Ages, the convent of Mariënhage in Eindhoven had its library, of which only very few traces have come down to us. These remains allow us, however, to reconstruct an intense intellectual life around books. Mariënhage probably produced liturgical manuscripts for other convents in the region and the spiritual life of the convent was enhanced by religious anthologies made in the convent itself. Apart from these, Mariënhage had one of the largest libraries in the Low Countries, which not only contained theological works, but also an important collection of historical writings. The latter is due to the donation of the private library of Nicolaus Clopper the Elder of Brussels. His son, Nicolaus Clopper the Younger, compiled an impressive chronicle of the history of the world, two copies of which have survived. The Royal Library of Belgium holds two manuscripts from this former convent, a devout booklet conceived for internal use in the 1520s and a historical manuscript from the actual library, which has a rough draft that probably may be linked to the world chronicle mentioned above.

Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Digging into Data for the History and Provenance of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts

Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Digging into Data for the History and Provenance of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts

Deconstructing "the Cairo Genizah": A Fresh Look at Genizah Manuscript Discoveries in Cairo before 1897

The discovery and relocation of genizah material is a multi-layered and complex story. This article re-examines, to the extent possible given the current available evidence, the discovery and distribution of Cairo genizah manuscripts in the late nineteenth century by taking a closer look at known historical accounts in conjunction with some lesser-known contemporary reports. Much provenance and provenience history was lost or destroyed during the course of multiple relocations and reorganizations of these materials; thus, this article emphasizes the need to pay greater attention to the multifaceted history of the Cairo manuscripts, and the need to be more circumspect when using an "across-the-board" term like "the Cairo Genizah." Such a label can prevent us from truly appreciating the breadth of Jewish material culture in Cairo in all its varied manifestations over time. More detailed provenance history for the genizah manuscripts will increase our knowledge about how culture is transmitted and how attitudes towards the preservation of Jewish cultural heritage have evolved.