Paris Bible Project Genesis

The Paris Bible Project aims to understand the production and diffusion of medieval Latin Bibles in Europe. A Paris Bible, also known as a Parisian Bible, is a format of Bible that is standardized in the 13th century and spreads as a model through Europe. We use handwritten text recognition (HTR) with a custom transcription scheme which preserves data about scribal practice to create sample transcriptions from Paris Bibles found in global collections. With these transcriptions we use different computational techniques to understand more about scribal practices.

NYU Abu Dhabi has digital research projects across campus in photography, sound, literature, history and Gulf Studies, arguably one of the stronger concentrations of digital humanities research among research universities in the Middle East region. At the Winter Institute in Digital Humanities in early 2020 two project Co-Directors met for the first time. Sharing a mutual interest in medieval manuscripts and digital humanities, they took the opportunity of the already digitised manuscripts in public institutions to develop this project in applied computer vision.