Graphic Motifs as an Aid to Handwritten Archive Transcription and Searching

Chris Powell, (The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford) gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. Institutions like Universities and Museums possess considerable volumes of handwritten personal archives, the content of which may be of research interest. However, these archives remain largely untranscribed and their content unknown. We describe our early investigation of word shape analysis, and particularly the decomposition of those shapes in to graphic motifs, as an assistive technology for the researcher wishing to transcribe entire documents, or to locate likely pages of interest within untranscribed documents.