Repository of the research project HOME History of Medieval Europe
Manuscripts are among the most important witnesses to our European shared cultural heritage and, while being increasingly digitized and published in large digital archives and libraries, they represent a valuable part of the European Digital Heritage. Its exploration, understanding, and dissemination of need new tools for promoting the community engagement with, and use of, heritage. Indeed, the wealth of information conveyed by the text captured in these images remains largely inaccessible, whereas general users and researchers more and more expect to query handwritten resources in plain text like printed books and, furthermore, to get the answers in a meaningful environment which accompanies the user experience with semantically structured information and visualisations. Capitalizing on the success of the JPI-CH Heritage Plus funded HIMANIS project, HOME will associate Computer Science (UPVLC, Teklia), Humanities (IRHT) and Cultural Heritage (NACR) in-stitutions, plus a network of Research and cultural heritage institutions (ICARUS as Associate Part-ner) in order to not only produce technology to generate new, research-based knowledge from his-torical manuscripts, but also implement a user and researcher friendly environment for fostering a meaningful experience for scholarly research and discovery.
HOME aims at (1) further developing searching approaches specifically designed for querying large sets of text images digitized from historical handwritten documents; (2) linking Digital Cultural Her-itage and associated metadata (abstract, indexes and text editions) and authority data (indexes, gazet-teers), which are disconnected from the digitized primary sources and stored in separate silos; (3) establishing a knowledge framework and a semantic information retrieval system, to understand the multilingual medieval sources; (4) presenting, visualizing and interpreting the sources on the History of Medieval Europe; (5) leveraging meaningful discovery and research experience in an user-centered and ergonomic environment.
- Transcription and Indexing: a new indexing/searching technology for historical manuscripts
- Full text search: a new paradigm to study our historical heritage, as conveyed by manuscripts, by using full text search technology.
- History of Europe: a new vision of the raise of nation states in Europe via a new study of the corpus under this paradigm.
HOME will establish a very large-scale digital dataset, based on the expertise of IRHT and NACR partners: 170 already digitized and indexed registers from the French royal chancery; 2800 medieval cartularies and register books in Czech Republic and in France; 43 000 (already digitized) documents from the archives of the Czech Republic in Monasterium, including 22 760 charters held by National Archives in Prague. HOME also establishes a link with Monasterium.net. HIMANIS Search engine
A first search engine has been established by the partners in HIMANIS and now in HOME. The 80,000 most relevant pages of the Trésor des Chartes have been made searchable thanks to a novel indexing technique specially designed in HIMANIS for manuscript images. A simple, preliminary interface to this index is provided here. HOME intends to create a knowledge framework to access the European medieval documentary heritage in a meaningful way.