e-Scripta

The paper describes the process of creating a model for the automatic rec- ognition of Serbian Church Slavonic printed books from Venice (from Božidar and Vincenzo Vuković’s printery) by using the Transkribus software platform, based on the principles of artificial intelligence and machine learning. By using the example of Prayer Book (Euchologion) (1538–1540) from Božidar Vuković’s printery, it has been shown that a successful model for the automatic recognition of individual books (with around 5% of unrecognized characters) can also be trained on the material consisting of approximately 4000 words, and that the increased amount of training material (in our case around 38000 words) leads to the improvement of the model and reduced error rate (between 1–2% of unrecognized characters). The most notable result of the paper is manifested through the creation of a generic model for the automatic text recognition of Serbian Church Slavonic books from Božidar and Vincenzo Vuković’s printery. The ini- tial version of the generic model (called Dionisio 1.0. by the Božidar Vuković’s Italian pseudonym – Dionisio della Vecchia) is the first resource for the automatic recognition of the Serbian medieval Cyrillic script, publicly available to all users of the Transkribus software platform (see https://readcoop.eu/model/dionisio-1-0/).

Subject: e-Scripta Digital humanities

Keywords: TRANSKRIBUS Automatic Text Recognition Serbian Early Printed Books Ar- tificial Intelligence MACHINE LEARNING Venice

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 15th century Latin manuscript containing a treatise by Parkosz was the very first proposal of Polish spelling. To account for all the phonemes of Polish some new letters were proposed, which are not available in the present day fonts. This makes difficult to quote the proposal when discussing the history of Polish spelling. The paper describes the transliteration proposed by the author which used the characters available in the Unicode standard. The ultimate solution is of course creating a specialized font and the paper mentions some aspects of this task.

Subject: e-Scripta Digital humanities

Keywords: Polish spelling Parkosz typography fonts Unicode

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