Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits

This manifesto documents the program and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12382 ‘Perspectives Workshop: Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits’. The workshop focused on the interaction of palaeography, the study of ancient and me- dieval documents, with computerised tools, particularly those developed for analysis of digital images and text mining. The goal of this marriage of disciplines is to provide e cient solutions to time and labor consuming palaeographic tasks. It furthermore attempts to provide scholars with quantitative evidence to palaeographical arguments, consequently facilitating a better understanding of our cultural heritage through the unique perspective of ancient and medieval documents. The workshop provided a vital opportunity for palaeographers to interact and discuss the potential of digital methods with computer scientists specialising in machine vision and statistical data analysis. This was essential not only in suggesting new directions and ideas for improving palaeographic research, but also in identifying questions which scholars working individually, in their respective elds, would not have asked without directly communicating with colleagues from outside their research community