Dagstuhl Manifesto – Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits

Palaeography is the field of Humanities research concerned with the study of ancient handwriting, books and documents. With the development of computerized tools, collaborations have grown between scholars of palaeography and computer scientists. These have led to tools being designed to provide palaeographers with computational means to analyze, retrieve, and compare ancient documents, reducing the many labour intensive elements involved in palaeographic study and paving the way towards making palaeography an evidence-based field. During September of 2012, computer scientists and palaeography scholars met at the Schloss-Dagstuhl / Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik for a Perspectives Workshop intended to explore the future for these multi-disciplinary collaborations. This paper presents some of the high-level conclusions and prospects for computation and palaeography which have emerged in these meetings, fuller discussion of which is available in the corresponding “Manifesto”.