Bram Caers

Medieval books were copied out by hand, often by professional scribes working on several books at the same time. Recognising scribal hands has been part and parcel of philology from the beginnings of the discipline in the eighteenth century, but has always been a laborious and to a certain extent subjective endeavour. In the present day, large-scale digitization of library holdings, advances in handwritten text recognition (HTR) and better availability of metadata concerning medieval manuscripts bring new opportunities to objectify, standardise and automate the analysis of scribal hands and the manuscripts that professional scribes produced.

Through the analysis of three-column manuscripts – professionally produced books that could include multiple texts – this project aims to expand our knowledge on professional scribal activity in the Low Countries. It gathers metadata on three-column manuscripts in Dutch, French, and Latin, and works towards hand-specific HTR models for known individual scribes. It will then skim digital collections in search of additional manuscripts that could be attributed to known scribes. The aim is to test the potential of HTR as a method for scribal recognition, through the user-friendly platform ‘Transkribus’. 

Koca Mehmet Kentel

Fire history has been a growing subfield of environmental history since the pioneering work of Stephen Pyne. The field has attracted significant traction in the last decade as wildfires have ravaged vast areas from Australia to the Siberian Arctic Circle, providing some of the most potent imagery of the Anthropocene, the symbols of the global ecological crisis that entangle city and nature, urban and rural, humans and nonhumans. Historians have addressed this moment by increasingly examining the fires in the past as fertile areas of investigation for environmental, urban, social, and cultural history. Non-western cities, however, have not received adequate attention. The current literature also lacks long-term studies that assess the transformation of “fire regimes” in specific geographies, in relation to the changes in material histories, environmental and climactic conditions, political systems, etc. 

Addressing this lacuna, A Digital Atlas of Istanbul on Fire endeavours to develop a digital map that would locate the fires in Ottoman Istanbul from the early 18th century to the end of the Ottoman Empire onto the city’s evolving urban geography. The map, created in QGIS, will be based on the data obtained from Sun Fire Insurance papers, located in the London Metropolitan Archives. These documents were created by insurance agents and investigators who operated in Istanbul. They contain detailed records of the fires that occurred during this period. They include information related to the geographic location, casualties, and material damage, and in some cases causal explanations. The collection also includes data concerning fires that transpired before the insurance companies began to operate in the Ottoman capital. Some of these older fires were of great magnitude and area already known to historians, others were footnotes in chronicles that did not make into the historiography. By putting them literally on the map, this project undertakes a visual representation of how Istanbul’s fire regime changed during the city’s modernization, expansion, and northward shift of its centre of gravity.
 

Nico Staring

Ancient Egyptian tombs at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Saqqara have walls bearing elaborate relief decoration. The iconographic programmes and texts have been the subject of extensive study, but the makers of the reliefs have received limited scholarly attention. Artists did not usually sign their work and so they are mostly anonymous to us.

The aim of this project is not to lift them from anonymity, but to learn more about their work(-processes), the types of tools used, and the ways in which the tools were handled. The reliefs can be considered as documents that, correctly understood, describe their own manufacture. Tools such as chisels, flint and polishing stones left marks on the stone. The problem is that such marks are usually not well visible, especially in finished works. To overcome this problem, the project will use Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI).

RTI is a photographic method that captures a subject’s shape and colour to reveal surface information invisible under normal examination. RTI has proven its value in archaeological research and cultural heritage imaging. The project proposed to LUCDH will examine large surfaces of wall reliefs that require the development of an adapted methodology. To this end, the applicant joins forces with Dr Andrea Pasqui of the Politecnico di Milano. The project will first test and adapt the methodology by analysing relief-decorated blocks held in the collection of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden (RMO). This phase is followed by field research at Saqqara, where the joint archaeological expedition of the RMO and Museo Egizio, Turin, have uncovered six relief-decorated tomb chapels (2017–2025) dated to the Egyptian Ramesside period (c. 1290–1190 BCE).

Johan Visser

How can we use digital methods to make colonial sources permanently accessible? This is the basis of this project. Sources from the seventeenth century about the Dutch Atlantic Empire are scattered across archives and libraries worldwide, ranging from national libraries in Brazil and Aruba to municipal archives in New York and Amsterdam. Although historians have long assumed that source material is scarce, the real problem is accessibility. Much has been digitized, yet a significant proportion of these "wandering documents" are poorly described and hard to find.

A systematic search of the National Archives in The Hague yielded 135 inventory numbers that have not yet been made digitally accessible or described. In collaboration with the National Archives, these documents are currently being digitised and will be made available via IIIF. The scans are being processed using handwritten text recognition with Loghi/Transkribus to create machine-readable text, which will be published in a public repository.

The biggest challenge, however, is not digitization but describing the individual documents buried in these large, unstructured collections. Through a combination of AI-driven segmentation and controlled metadata generation by large language models each document is enriched with information such as the author, addressee, location, date, and summary, before being corrected by a student assistant. This allows us disclose the colonial archive quicker than before, helping to digitally connect entities across archival boundaries.

All scans, transcriptions, and metadata will be integrated into Dutch Atlantic Sources (DAS), a digital platform, for the first time, brings together the fragmented world of seventeenth-century Atlantic archives. DAS enables research from home and contributes to the decolonization of archives by eliminating inequalities in access to shared heritage.