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Research Group for Medieval Philology
International Seminar

Digital Approaches to Transcribing and Analysing Medieval Texts

An international seminar organised by the Research Group for Medieval Philology focusing on the application of digital tools for text-critical work on medieval texts.

Den norske homilieboken
The Old Norwegian Homily Book, AM 619 4to, fol. 56v.
Photo:
Den Arnamagneanske Håndskriftsamling, København

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The Research Group for Medieval Philology has the pleasure to invite all interested parties to a two-day international seminar on digital tools and approaches in the field of medieval textual criticism. Scholars from Italy, UK, Netherlands, Iceland, Finland and Norway will share their research and experiences with a number of digital tools and discuss their application to the analysis of medieval textual works. 

This seminar is organised with financial support from the Faculty of Humanities, University of Bergen. Attendance is free of charge but requires registration (see link under Registration).

PDF version of the programme with abstracts for all talks

Programme:

Thursday, 29th August 

09.00  Opening Address by Jørgen Sejersted, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities

Introduction by Odd Einar Haugen on behalf of the organising committee

1. Transcription Procedures 

Chair: Nina Stensaker

09.20  Marina Buzzoni (Venice): TransKribing Medieval Handwritten Texts 

10.10  Elisa Cugliana (Cologne): OCRopus: A Helping Hand - or Tentacle - for your Transcriptions

11.00  Coffee break 

11.30  Rune Kyrkjebø (Bergen): From Paper to TEI - An Experiment with the OCR in the Digitisation of Gustav Indrebø’s Version of Sverris saga  

12.20  Lunch break 

13.30  Robert K. Paulsen (Bergen): Don’t do more than you have to do! Streamlining the Transcription of Old Norse Manuscripts with MenotaBlitz

14.20  Coffee break 

2. Preparation for Stemmatic Analysis 

Chair: Odd Einar Haugen

14.40  Joris van Zundert (Amsterdam): Making Yourself Understandable to the Universal Machine: From Transcription to Computer Tractable Data 

15.30  Marina Buzzoni (Venice): Applications of Computer-Assisted Stemmatology to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Tradition

16.20  Discussion and demonstration of tools 

Friday, 30th August

3. Stemmatic Analysis in Practice 

Chair: Zuzana Stankovitsová

09.00  Bjarni Gunnar Ásgeirsson (Reykjavík): Some Limitations of Quantitative Methods and Sampling in the Light of Old and Recent Work on Snorra-Edda and Brennu-Njáls saga

09.50  Alaric Hall (Leeds): Five Stemmas of Sigurgarðs saga frækna, Sampling, and the Transmission of riddarasögur

10.40  Coffee break 

11.10  Tuomas Heikkilä (Helsinki): Humanities Scholars and Computerized Tools: Comparing Recent Approaches of Computer-Assisted Stemmatology