Graphic Motifs as an Aid to Handwritten Archive Transcription and Searching

Chris Powell, (The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford) gives a
talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School.
Institutions like Universities and Museums possess considerable
volumes of handwritten personal archives, the content of which may
be of research interest. However, these archives remain largely
untranscribed and their content unknown. We describe our early
investigation of word shape analysis, and particularly the
decomposition of those shapes in to graphic motifs, as an assistive
technology for the researcher wishing to transcribe entire
documents, or to locate likely pages of interest within
untranscribed documents.