Home About Subscribe Search Member Area

Humanist Discussion Group


< Back to Volume 33

Humanist Archives: April 1, 2020, 8:54 a.m. Humanist 33.715 - learning to read handwritten documents

                  Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 715.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
                   Hosted by King's Digital Lab
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org


    [1]    From: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen 
           Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.712: learning to read handwritten documents (78)

    [2]    From: Emily Smith 
           Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.712: learning to read handwritten documents (62)


--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2020-04-01 07:48:24+00:00
        From: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.712: learning to read handwritten documents

> On 31,Mar2020, at 1:02 AM, Humanist  wrote:
> ...
>
> ... design
> a digital font approximating the hand without any compromises to modern
> expectations (as he has done), then giving it to the students so that
> they can decipher a text in it that they themselves have entered. I
> assume the approach works best when the students copy from a modern
> transcription of a manuscript they are trying to read.

Why?

You surprise me.  If as you suggest the point is to learn to read the
hand, then will not any words or strings of characters chosen by the
learner serve as well, as long as the learner knows what words and
characters they are?

In general, I assume the approach will work best when the learner
chooses the words or letters to look at in the new font.
(I also assume that restricting one’s attention to manuscripts for which
modern transcriptions already exist would be an effective way of sapping
the students’ desire to learn to read the hand in question in the first
place.  But maybe that’s just me.  If there were modern transcriptions
of the documents used in the paleography classes I took in school — I
have no reason to assume there were, or weren’t — my instructors took
good care that we should not know where to find them.)

> How well would this method work for manuscript hands across the board?

To state the obvious (since if you don’t, maybe someone should), it’s
going to work best for hands (or fonts — students raised on Century
Schoolbook or Helvetica often report dismay when confronting black
letter, and this technique might be helpful in that case, too) in which
the letters have mostly consistent forms, and there are not too many
ligatures that reshape their constituent letters into what a novice
reader may regard as quite different and unrelated shapes.   Digital
fonts can indeed deal with ligatures and variant forms, but I would 
expect that it might involve more work than the instructor will relish, 
to actually use those features in rendering the student-entered 
document.  I may be wrong; does everyone else already know that web 
browsers and word processors, and (La)TeX, already use variant letter 
forms and ligatures without any work at all beyond selecting the font?  
The last time I looked, it looked a lot harder than that.)

Of course, knowing the non-ligatured forms of letters is helpful and may
give the learner enough information to be able to deal with ligatures and
variant forms.

> Under what circumstances would it fail to reproduce the manuscript in
> question?

All of them.

How could it not?  Anyone who expects that using a manuscript-inspired font
will reproduce the manuscript which inspired it has evidently not looked
carefully at the manuscript (or possibly has not looked carefully at
documents using the font).  It would surprise me if Peter Baker has any
such expectation.

Anyone who wants a facsimile reproduction needs a camera, not a font.

> What would the failures reveal?

That human hands wielding quills do not produce the same results as
movable type or its digital equivalent (and vice versa).

To whom can any of this be news?


********************************************
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com
http://www.blackmesatech.com





--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2020-04-01 07:47:17+00:00
        From: Emily Smith 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.712: learning to read handwritten documents

Dear Prof. McCarty,

As a current Masters student, I am still in my own first few years of
encountering palaeography (I would say "learning", but I doubt true
mastery is ever achieved!). This digitised approach sounds thoroughly
intriguing, and certainly useful - but with one caveat! The most
frustrating instances in paleography class were always those associated
with a hand's...well, randomness. Accepting that one /e /may look
nothing like the next (even if they're in exactly the same word!) took
quite a cognitive shift, as we all taught ourselves to stop our brains
automatically filtering out possibilities! As such, I'd be concerned
that a programme such as this would risk minimising this variation, and
thus make it more difficult for students to approach "real" texts in the
long term.

Of course, this could always be accounted for by programming in some
randomness!

Best wishes,
Emily

On Tue, 31 Mar 2020 at 08:02, Humanist > wrote:

                        Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 712.
                  Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
                         Hosted by King's Digital Lab
     www.dhhumanist.org 
                      Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
     




              Date: 2020-03-30 11:13:26+00:00
              From: Willard McCarty >
              Subject: inadequacies illumined, complexities revealed

     A participant in MEDTEXTL list, Professor Peter Baker (English,
     Virginia), has described an intriguing approach to the teaching of
     palaeography, particularly in the case of the Secretary hand: to design
     a digital font approximating the hand without any compromises to modern
     expectations (as he has done), then giving it to the students so that
     they can decipher a text in it that they themselves have entered. I
     assume the approach works best when the students copy from a modern
     transcription of a manuscript they are trying to read.

     How well would this method work for manuscript hands across the board?
     Under what circumstances would it fail to reproduce the manuscript in
     question? What would the failures reveal?

     Yours,
     WM
     --
     Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/ ),
     Professor emeritus, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College
     London; Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews
     (www.tandfonline.com/loi/yisr20
     ) and Humanist
     (www.dhhumanist.org )



_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php


Editor: Willard McCarty (King's College London, U.K.; Western Sydney University, Australia)
Software designer: Malgosia Askanas (Mind-Crafts)

This site is maintained under a service level agreement by King's Digital Lab.