Digital humanities

The so-called Bamberg Cyrillic Alphabet (ca. 13th c.) is one of the oldest and most reliable xenographic Slavic alphabets, i.e. a Cyrillic alphabet added to a Latin manuscript of non-related content. It has been published and edited before in black- and-white, and it is presented here for the first time in a high-quality colour photograph, accompanied by a slightly revised tabular reprentation.

Subject: e-Scripta Digital humanities

Keywords: Cyrillic Script Historic Alphabets Facsimile

The article provides a thorough review of the presented authors and reports during the scientific conference “Book and Script. Tradition and Modernity”. The scientific conference held on the 8th and 9th of April, 2022, is the first attempt of its kind for an interdisciplinary approach to examine the development of books and scripts from a historical and theoretical aspect. Twenty four papers were presented during the conference from the following institutions: Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, National Academy of Arts, Plovdiv University “Paisii Hilendarski”, Southwestern University “Neofit Rilski”, UniBit (University of Library Science and Information Technology), New Bulgarian University, Institute of Bulgarian Language at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, National Library “St. Cyril and Methodius”, Regional Library “P. Pavlovich” (Silistra), University of Zurich, Typeflow (Rijeka). The main topics during the conference were the script origin among Bulgarians; the early Slavic printed books; scripts and manuscripts; the Revival book and its characteristics; books and fonts in modern times; libraries, books and modern approaches in describing them. There was a general consensus that the interdisciplinary approach opens up new fields and horizons for research in the field of books and scripts.

Subject: e-Scripta Digital humanities

Keywords: book printed book Revival book manuscript manuscript book Cyrillic Script Glagolitic script script font print typography paper illustrations

The last decade has brought an upswing in research on natural language processing. However, it is well known that historical language stages are largely underrepresented. Middle Bulgarian Church Slavonic, a language variety with a significant literary productivity, is a prime example. In the current paper, it is shown how annotated texts of related language varieties can be used to annotate texts written in Middle Bulgarian Church Slavonic, such as the 14th-century translation of the Dioptra. In particular, I present a way of adapting the available training data and of reducing the differences between training and test data, thereby improving the result of the automatic morphological annotation. Moreover, it is demonstrated that a comparison with the original work, written in Byzantine Greek, can further increase the results of the annotation by carefully disambiguating homonymous word forms. The presented results can benefit research on Middle Bulgarian Church Slavonic as it shows how texts in this variety can be annotated without authentic training data. The proposed method may be of use not only for Slavonic Studies, however. The method of using training data from genetically related language varieties in combination with translations may be used to annotate other underrepresented language varieties as well.

Subject: Debuts Digital humanities Medieval Studies Linguistic History of Literature

Keywords: Middle Bulgarian Church Slavonic natural language processing part-of- speech tagging Middle Greek Dioptra

The publications in the e-Scripta section are selected, reviewed and revised papers delivered at El’Manuscript 2021 (Freiburg/online) in April, 2021 (www. elmanuscript2021.uni-freiburg.de). El’Manuscript is a series of biennial international conferences entitled “Textual Heritage and Information Technologies” that brings together linguists, specialists in historical source criticism, IT specialists, and others involved in publishing and studying our textual heritage. It is the official conference of the Special Commission on the Computer-Supported Processing of Mediæval Slavonic Manuscripts and Early Printed Books to the International Committee of Slavists. In the 2021 iteration, it coincided with the meeting of the Humboldt research group linkage program DigiPalSlav (Slavic Department at Freiburg University and Institute for the Russian Language, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) devoted to developing and applying digital tools for pre-modern Orthodox Slavic such as neural taggers and Handwritten Text Recognition models. These issues are also reflected in the thematic focus of the 2021 iteration of El’Manuscript and, consequently, in the topics of the papers submitted and accepted for publication. We would like to thank our external reviewers for their thorough work and for meeting our tight deadlines. Furthermore, we thank Elena Renje for her valuable support. Many thanks are due to the Humboldt Foundation for financing the publication of this volume. Finally, we are grateful to the editor of Scripta & e-Scripta, Anissava Miltenova, for her tireless work and support.

Subject: Digital humanities

This paper is a write-up of a keynote from El’Manuscript 2021, reflecting on the ways in which the field of computationally-supported medieval Slavic studies has and has not changed since the mid-2000’s. Looking towards developments in the broader fields of digital humanities and natural-language processing, it explores the ways that recent improvements in the tools at our disposal for mass digitization of manuscripts and text analysis at scale open up possibilities for working with manuscripts that have received very little attention. For these advancements to be feasible, however, scholars will need to prepare and share their digitized texts and annotations in ways that are not currently the norm, though a number of projects provide exemplary models of how these new conventions could be put into practice.

Subject: Digital humanities

Keywords: digitization handwritten text recognition natural language processing treebanks

The article contains some results of analyses of the Vienna part of the Codex Marianus (ÖNB, Vind. slav. 146), undertaken by an interdisciplinary group of scholars and scientists from the Centre of Image and Material Analysis in Cultural Heritage (CIMA ‒ www.cima@or.at) within two Austrian Science Fund-projects devoted to the ancient Glagolitic heritage. The investigation consisted of four parts, codicological, multispectral, chemical and philological. While the codicological survey served to get as much information as possible about the writing material (source of parchment, methods of preparation, writing process, deletions, condition), color and multispectral recordings had been made to preserve the manuscript at its best and to provide an apt basis for further investigations. The chemical analysis was executed with two portable spectroscopes (XRF and rFTIR) and aimed to get exact information on the parchment, the inks, paints and binders, and to collect data for a comparative study of parchment degradation. The philologists analysed the fragment comparatively with all other Old Church Slavonic-Glagolitic manuscripts preserved to get as much information as possible about their scribes.

Subject: Digital humanities

Keywords: Codex Marianus codicology Multi-Spectral Imaging XRF and FTIR- spectroscopy dating and localizing manuscript-scribes

The paper defines the elementary principles for creating an electronic corpus of Serbian medieval charters and letters. The commitment to the principle of maximum representativeness of the corpus of medieval charters and letters, determined entirely by the preserved written legacy (based on manuscripts, microfilms or photographs), excludes the indispensability of applying the principle of balance, while simultaneously satisfying the principle of reliability, since charters and letters known solely by the edition are not included in the corpus. The selection of texts is done according to the diplomatic criterion by excluding the transcripts and copies of documents already available in the original, as well as later transcripts, chronologically and linguistically distant from the assumed original. This approach to the selection of texts is justified by the size of the corpus, as well as by the exceptional cultural and historical significance of medieval charters and letters. The definition of the metadata about corpus texts is determined by their general diplomatic properties, as well as the corpus search needs for diatopic, diachronic and genre variations. Conversion of texts into electronic form strives for fidelity to the original, encompassing the preservation of abbreviations, superscript letters and original punctuation, as well as the absence of accent marks and contemporary rules of capitalization.

Subject: Digital humanities

Keywords: Historical Corpus Linguistics Old Serbian language Serbian Church Slavonic Serbian Medieval Charters and Letters 12th–16th century

The St Petersburg Corpus of Hagiographic Texts (SCAT) has launched two new mark-up formats. The first innovation is the comprehensive format developed for the division of hagiographic texts into parts, which are both explicitly marked as section headings and extrapolated through comparison with texts of the similar genre. The second innovation is an elaborate format representing the full range of various types of biblical, patristic and liturgical quotations occurring in the lives of saints. For the time being, three morphologically annotated manuscript texts have been marked up according to these guidelines, and we are planning to add two more texts in the near future. Close cooperation with the IHRIM research laboratory (Lyon) and wide use of their techniques and technology makes it possible to obtain some illuminating cross- format statistical data and thus offer new insights into the canons and rules of the Old Russian hagiography.

Subject: Digital humanities

Keywords: diachronic text corpus Old Russian hagiography TXM technology content structuring Biblical quotations

The neural network tagger CLStM has been applied to the Old Russian Žitie Evfimija Velikogo (GIM, Chud. 20), a copy of the second half of the 14th century. The strengths of this tagger consist in its ability to automatically annotate an orthographically non-normalized text with dozens of pages within a few minutes, yielding a high accuracy with respect to part of speech and morphological features. Moreover, the tagger is capable of disambiguating case syncretism to a large extent, even in split constructions. Manual correction of the automatic tagging will result in a correctly tagged text considerably faster than when using a rule-based tagger or tagging completely manually. The weaknesses of the CLStM-tagger comprise certain examples of incorrect POS-tagging, sometimes incomplete or incorrect attribution of morphological categories to some parts of speech. Superscript letters and punctuation can pose special problems, normalization of punctuation will achieve better tagging results. The proportion of correct tags is higher when the token has been seen during the training process; unknown words (OOV) show a higher error rate. In the paper, we analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the tagger by providing specific examples. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to use automatically tagged, uncorrected data for quantitative analysis.

Subject: Digital humanities

Keywords: Neural network tagger POS and full morphology tagging context sensitivity punctuation quantitative analysis

The paper presents results, including work in progress, related to two databases of “non-bookish” / vernacular Old East Slavic writing, viz. the databases of birchbark letters and epigraphy. The aim of the project is the interlinking of visual, archeological/ historical and linguistic information. The epigraphical database represents different interpretations of a single inscription, providing the outline of versions proposed in the existing literature. These sources, an archeographical database and a linguistic corpus making part of a larger Russian National corpus, are intended to be easily synchronized, expanded, and updated. An online work station for the morphological annotation of texts is a part of this project. An important function performed by this platform is creating an index to the corpus that can be used in the linguistic description of the dialect, verifying the index and the data of the book Old Novgorod Dialect. Addenda by Andrei Zaliznjak that is being prepared for a posthumous publication. New linguistic discoveries have been made during the implementation of the project.

Subject: Digital humanities

Keywords: birchbark letters; Old East Slavic; epigraphy; databases of archeological findings; corpora

The work demonstrates the methods and techniques of elimination of variation of linguistic units in the transcriptions of the medieval Slavonic manuscripts of the historical corpus “Manuscript” (manuscripts.ru). The textual corpus, the material of which is presented by the machine-readable copies which resemble the original most closely, provides the user with such tools of transformation (modification) of linguistic units which enable the creation of queries and getting of retrievals corresponding to the task to be solved. In case of an inexact search the user has the possiblity to delete titlos and diacritics, reduction of the versions of letters to their basic form, indication of the mask of the linguistic units being searched in the form of a regular expression, use of the letters of the contemporary Cyrillic alphabet. To ensure operations over lemmas by means of the statistic modules of the corpus, it is necessary to automatically assign a given textual form to exactly one lemma. Due to grammatical homonymy, incorrect lemmatization would result in a situation where quantitative data based on word forms and data based on lemmas do not match each other. In order to assign word forms to the correct lemma, we apply a rule-based approach, taking into account the formal and quantitative characteristics of the linguistic units (such as their morphological variation or invariation, their frequency in the sub-corpus, the matching or mismatching with the lemma form, the frequency of relationships between the textual forms and dictionary paradigms of variable words, the results of manual elimination of the homonymy). The reduction of textual forms to unified, normalized, transliterated or initial forms is a necessary procedure for extracting of data from the historical corpus for the distributive-statistical analysis of the semantics of linguistic units.

Subject: Digital humanities

Keywords: historical corpus search and demonstration of data LINGUISTIC STATISTICS

Digital annotation of verbal aspect in Old Russian and Church Slavonic texts is a challenging and quite complicated task that requires a complex approach. While studying Slavic aspect systems synchronically, we always know whether the verb is perfective, imperfective or biaspectual, however, this is often not the case for the research of aspect in a diachronic perspective. The determination of the aspectual status of a particular verb for earlier stages is possible only after considering together different parameters such as: actionality, lexical semantic, morphology, functional distribution, syntactic restrictions, collocations, statistics etc. All essential parameters should be annotated sufficiently for an effective use of a corpora. That would enable a researcher to collect quickly the information necessary to build aspectual profile of a verb. It is also important to understand the hierarchy of the parameters, as they might have different degrees of importance, and for this purpose a special algorithm should be developed. The preliminary results, related to the parameters of annotation and the algorithm for aspect determination (using ‘Morphy’, the System for digital morphological annotation of Old Russian and Church Slavonic manuscripts, developed in Vinogradov Russian Language Institute RAS), are discussed in the paper.

Subject: Digital humanities

Keywords: verbal aspect digital annotation Old Russian Old Church Slavonic

This paper presents a digital edition of the manuscript of the first Russian translation of Leprince de Beaumont’s The Beauty and the Beast fairy tale (1756), aligned to its French original. The translation was made in 1758 by a twelve year-old girl, Khionia Demidova (1746-1792), and dedicated to her elder brother. Its original manuscript is conserved at the scientific library of Saratov State University (no. 456). This document is interesting from several points of view: the “naive” translation made by a young girl allows us to understand how the French literature was perceived in the 18th century Russia, what aspects of the French language and socio-cultural phenomena of the Western Europe were difficult to understand, and how the socio-cultural phenomena of the Western Europe were perceived. The peculiarities of Khionia’s spelling and punctuation provide data on her knowledge of Russian grammar and orthography. The digital edition includes a multi-layer transcription of the source document aligned with a digital fac-simile and the original French text. It is published online on the TXM-IHRIM web portal (https://txm-ihrim.huma-num.fr). The workflow of the edition Microsoft Word, Oxgarage and TXM may be reused for similar editions and text corpora.

Subject: Digital humanities

Keywords: digital editing TXM Russian literature of the 18th century Russian-French literary contacts

The article deals with various efforts of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB) to make its collection of about 250 Church-Slavic prints from the 17th to the 19th century accessible in terms of content using the methods of modern information technology from the Digital Humanities sector. The focus is on full-text indexing of the heterogeneous Church Slavonic prints using HTR+ language models from the programme Transkribus. Depending on whether they are Moscow, Kiev or Old Believer prints, these models require different approaches and corresponding adaptations that take into account the printing area and printing period. Prints such as Kirillova kniga (1644) or Gistorija Ioanna Damaskina (1637) and many others are processed at large scale, whereby the developed character recognition models are constantly refined by training new verified data. The full texts generated in this way are permanently stored in various XML formats (ALTO, PAGE) on the one hand in a central repository for subsequent use, and on the other hand they are merged with original digital copies in the IIIF-compatible Digital Library of the SBB. As a further element, the Church Slavonic full texts will be indexed using special SOLR analyzers for efficient searches (Tokinising, Translit, N-Grams) and made searchable in subject portals (including the Slavistik-Portal) using modern text-image web design.

Subject: Digital humanities

Keywords: CHURCH SLAVONIC Old prints Transkribus; automatic transcription model training data processing and retrieval

The paper discusses some results obtained as part of an ongoing project at the Slavic Institute of Heidelberg University to produce automatic transcriptions of an early 18th century trilingual printed dictionary (Fedor Polikarpov’s Leksikon trejazyčnyj) and, on a preliminary basis, of a 17th century trilingual manuscript (Epifanij Slavineckii’s working copy of his Greek–Slavic–Latin dictionary) using the handwritten text recognition (HTR) platforms Transkribus and eScriptorium. It is argued that there are considerable advantages to employing such tools in terms of the simplification and acceleration of work on multilingual edition projects. Moreover, a comparison of our experience working with Transkribus and eScriptorium is given, along with an overview of the practical benefits and challenges of working with each of these platforms.

Subject: Digital humanities

Keywords: TRANSKRIBUS eScriptorium handwritten text recognition HTR pre-modern Early modern multilingual lexica

We report on applying Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to manuscripts from the archive of Konstantin Rychkov preserved at IOM RAS, St. Petersburg, within the INEL project. Folklore texts in Evenki (Tungusic) were collected in Western Siberia in 1910s. We used services provided by the Transkribus platform. The necessary step of Layout Analysis proved to be time-consuming due to the organization of the parallel Evenki- Russian text on the page without following a strict separation line. HTR models have been trained successively on different amounts of data up to 521 pages. The best Character Error Rate attained on validation data for the largest dataset is 4.50% for models trained on all characters. The distribution of errors is non-uniform: most errors are due to just a few problematic issues, especially diacritics such as the accent marking stress. It is written high above the line and frequently cut off from the line images at the preprocessing stage. After excluding the stress mark from training data and recognition, the lowest CER dropped to 2.90%. We compared two recognition engines, HTR+ and PyLaia. The HTR+ model trained without stress marks made less errors in letters, while PyLaia performed better with respect to diacritics.

Subject: Manuscript Digital humanities

Keywords: TRANSKRIBUS PyLaia Russian Evenki bilingual manuscript