O. Ohara
Digital Images in the Study of Medieval Documents
- how to use them for the graphemic and graphetic
investigation of the Cely Letters.
As the first step for making XML files of the Cely Letters of
the fifteenth century in England, all the pages of the EETS text
edited by Alison Hanham are scanned and a tentative text file
is made using an OCR software. In this stage, deciding which
information should be included from the text is very important.
For example, abbreviations are expanded and printed in italics
in the text in order to show the real picture of the extant
letters, and we should show them in our basic electronic text,
too. If we are, however, in the circumstances where we have
easy access to the real documents, we will soon find that the
way of showing abbreviations in the text is not always consistent.
The National Archives in England offers color digital images of
these documents. They can be seen wherever we are if you carry
a PC and making use of some retouching software, such as
Photoshop and others, we can easily clip the necessary part
and enlarge it for our investigation. The main purpose of
this paper is to show how we can use these digital images
and apply them to our study of the medieval documents. I will
also show the process of making the database concerning
graphemic and graphetic variants, classifying them into
appropriate categories, and clarifying the different
characteristics of each writers graphemes.
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