eCodicology: The Computer and the Mediaeval Library

Through digitisation a large amount of mediaeval manuscript collection became publicly available, but the resources in time and human attention have not grown in proportion of digitised sources. Therefore, the question arises whether the computer can help to evaluate larger amounts of material like this. The project eCodicology has focused its research on the detection and measuring of the different layout features by using methods of pattern recognition for further analyses. The present paper gives insights into the developed software, SWATI – the Software Workflow for the Automatic Tagging of Images, and CodiVis, a visualisation framework for high-dimensional data sets, and how it can help the codicologist to explore the massive amount of heterogeneous datasets. The paper also focusses the various challenges, such as uncertain data due to irregularities and missing information in the manuscript’s catalogues, as well as the accuracy of the image processing results.