VW foundation funds “Tironian Notes and Digital Tools”
We are pleased that the VW foundation funds the project “Shorthand in historical documents. Development of a shorthand tool based on the decipherment of a Vergil commentary in Tironian Notes”. The 1,5 years project focuses on transcribing and editing ancient to early medieval stenography using pattern recognition. The basis for this endeavor is a commentary on the Roman poet Vergil, dating back to the 9th century. The handwritten text, composed in shorthand (Tironian Notes), remains largely unexplored and will now be deciphered by means of pattern recognition. Ultimately, the method is intended to be adaptable for other shorthand systems, enabling the accessibility of barely legible literature and administrative scripts across changing systems up to the present day.
This project is a joint project with our collaborators from the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Nikolaus Weichselbaumer) and University of Heidelberg (Tino Licht, Kirsten Wallenwein) and the pattern recognition lab (Vincent Christlein).
Image caption: Carolingian commentary in shorthand and alphabetic script on Virgil’s “Georgica”. The Vergil commentary “Vergilius Turonensis” was written in the scriptorium – the writing room – of St. Martin’s Abbey in Tours and is now part of the holdings of the Burgerbibliothek in Bern (cod. 165, 32v). (© Burgerbibliothek)