Duke University (Durham, NC 27705-4677)
Margaret R. Greer (Project Director: October 2008 to April 2011)
HD-50578-09
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Digital Humanities
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[White paper][Grant products]
Totals:
$49,992 (approved)
$49,992 (awarded)
Grant period:
9/1/2009 – 12/31/2010
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Manos Teatrales: Cyber-Paleography and a Virtual World of Spanish Golden Age Theater
The development of handwriting identification software using archival materials from Spanish Golden Age theater.
In the Manos Teatrales (Theatrical Hands) project, literary scholars, historians and computer scientists will develop manual and automatic methods for analyzing rich manuscripts collections and their societies, using the treasure-trove of Spanish Golden Age theater and related archival records as a case study. Our cyber-paleography effort will build a live, layered virtual world on the web, open to librarians, scholars and students. A first layer will connect digitally restored images of manuscript pages to descriptions of the pen strokes on paper. Manual and automatic analysis of these descriptions will yield profiles of the writers' handwriting styles and enable semi-automatic inferences based on machine learning methods, about who wrote what and when. A second layer will connect sources to individual and collective histories of the theater community and help scholars understand it. A third layer will describe the techniques of cyber-paleography for both humanists and scientists.
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