Digital Remediations of Manuscript Archives

Event details

CECS Research Seminar with speaker Dr Rachael Scarborough King, CECS British Academy International Fellow ((University of California, Santa Barbara)

This talk explores methods for making handwritten documents accessible to computational analysis and discusses some of the results of topic modeling and network graphing of the Ballitore Collection. Handwriting remains one of the frontiers of the digital humanities, as efforts to make manuscript documents accessible to OCR encoding continue to develop. In this talk, I will argue that working with medium-sized collections of archival materials allows us to combine elements of close and distant reading and to access collections in ways that are congenial to many of the current theoretical directions in archival studies. Our present-day methods illuminate aspects of the archiving and interpretation that authors and readers undertook in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.