Lunchtime Lecture - Dominique Stutzmann
Channel: DH_Graz
Date: 2017-05-11

Automated indexing of medieval manuscripts: the HIMANIS research project and the registers of the French royal chancery

Abstract
Large quantities of historical handwritten documents are available online. Yet, the wealth of information conveyed by the text captured in these images remains largely inaccessible and cannot be queried in plain text like printed books. The HIMANIS research project, funded by the JPI on Cultural Heritage, aims at developing cost-effective solutions for querying large sets of handwritten document images. To this end, HIMANIS gathers Computer Science (A2iA, Universities of Valencia and Groningen) and Humanities (IRHT) and Cultural Heritage institutions (Archives Nationales of France).
   As a challenging and particularly interesting case study, HIMANIS focusses on the large collection of registers produced by the French royal chancery (14th-15th c.). Making this iconic collection, heart of one of the most centralized state in Europe, available for research communities and a general audience, shall set a new standard for future digitization plans as well as allow to deepen our understanding of the raise of nation states in Europe.

Biografie von Dominique Stutzmann, PhD
After degrees in Classics, History and German studies at the Sorbonne, he studied at the École nationale des Chartes (2002), received a MLIS and worked at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. He completed a PhD on scribal practices of Cistercian communities in medieval Burgundy (statistical analysis of scribal profiles based on TEI encoding). From 2007-2012 and 2015 onwards, he has been a lecturer for medieval paleography and digital scholarly edition at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and, since 2010 he is senior researcher at the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (CNRS). He currently is leading as Principal Investigator several research projects in the field of digital humanities (ANR Oriflamms, ECMEN, HIMANIS on computer automated image analysis applied to palaeography, Saint-Bertin for virtually reconstructing of a former library) and organizes international conferences, sessions, summer school (Leeds, Dagstuhl, Saint-Omer).