The quest to reproduce human intelligence in software has led to the introduction of many well-known computer applications that are increasingly, and yet sometimes most unnoticeably, becoming a part of our everyday lives. In the field of digital humanities, various forms of AI have played a role of increasing importance for a number of decades.

Now that computer technologies are maturing at a rapid pace, scientists and historians expect to see the emergence of many more collaborations between the humanities and AI in the future.  

AI is transforming historical research in profound ways. It aids in unlocking secrets contained in centuries-old documents and enabling technological and historical analysis at a level not previously thought possible.

Studying the past 

Paleography, the scholarly study of historical handwriting, is a crucial auxiliary science in medieval studies for codicologists, literary scholars, and historians alike. Presently, there is a strong demand among all stakeholders for automated, compu

ter-assisted techniques to assist scholars in their work. These are the areas where AI comes to play. Methods such as CLaMM Competition, bag of words model, Deep-Learning-Based Classification etc., are some of the commonly used techniques by researchers.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are considered the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, dating from the 4th century BCE. Since its discovery 70 years earlier in Israel, researchers have studied the Scrolls. Part of the Scrolls, the Great Isaiah Scroll, one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls and the largest and best-preserved scroll, was previously believed to be the work of one scribe.

By using artificial intelligence (AI), researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands analyzed the Great Isaiah Scroll, running 24 feet long and consumes 17 pieces of parchment. 

Scribe ID AI 

A new research project called Scribe ID AI, from St. Polten University of Applied Sciences, will make use of AI to identify manuscripts from the 12th century in the library of Klosterneuburg Monastery.

Lower Austria’s monasteries have extensive collections of medieval manuscripts. Located in Eastern Austria, Klosterneuburg Monastery was founded in 1113 and remained an important monastic site throughout the Middle Ages. Its library contains 1250 medical manuscripts.  

A broader knowledge of scribes provides a comprehensive understanding of monastic scriptoria in high medieval Austria. But there is no information about the number of scribes employed and whether they moved around between monasteries. Analyzing writing styles to identify different scribes is a way to determine these factors. Usually, medieval handwriting is studied by individual experts. This process is lengthy and time-consuming.  

Scribe ID AI involves historians and computer scientists. It aims at developing time-efficient identification of scribes for large corpora. It deploys an active machine learning approach that specifically involves human experts to support machine learning.  

Digitized manuscripts of the Klosterneuburg Monastery are used as a database. A classification model for the identification of scribes is developed and trained. And finally, classical descriptors are supplemented or replaced by automatically learned descriptors. 

In addition, there is a corpus of about 40,000 digital manuscript pages with unknown writer identification. This data source is transformed into data sets and subjected to an Active Learning approach. 

Conclusion 

The use of AI in historical studies is not confined to studying manuscripts. It played a key role in preserving cave paintings in Ajanta Caves. DeepMind’s technology Ithaca unfolded an AI-grounded technique to decipher the missing text of damaged inscriptions, identify their original location and establish the date they were created.

Using AI in historical research helps not only to work on a significant desideratum of historical research interactively but also establishes new possibilities and tools for analysis that allow deeper knowledge. For example, based on the study of the Klosterneuburg scriptorium in the last third of the 12th century, larger unresolved questions about the organization of scriptoria in the high medieval (Lower) Austrian monasteries can be addressed with further evidence and interpretations.