CFP Handwriting Recognition and Collaborative Editing

Call for Papers for two sessions at the Forty-Fifth International Congress on Medieval Studies, held annually at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. Although it is a medieval studies conference, it’s quite broad and includes sessions ranging from the Late Antique through the Renaissance. There is a lot of really fabulous work going on in the digital classics community on both of these topics and it would be wonderful to introduce that work to medievalists who aren’t already aware of it. (Kzoo, as the event is affectionately called, is also a lot of fun. You can’t bring together 3000 medievalists in one small town without a certain amount of merrymaking.)

The Digital Medievalist Community of Practice (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/) is sponsoring two sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 7-10, 2009 (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/). See below for session names and descriptions.

Please send inquiries and abstracts for 20-minute presentations to Peter Robinson at p.m.robinson@bham.ac.uk. Abstracts must be attached to a Participant Information Form, available in both MS Word and PDF formats from the Congress website: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF.

Proposals must be submitted by September 15, 2009.

Paper session: The state of the art in handwriting recognition and analysis for medieval documents

Much work has been done towards automated analysis of handwritten documents, with a focus on handwriting recognition, in the last years, and some of the developments seen in OCR and layout recognition systems may be applicable to medieval studies. Further, the increasing interest in sophisticated linkages of text and image might be enhanced by developments in handwriting recognition and analysis. We welcome papers which report on work done or ongoing in these areas, or which seek to establish methodologies.

Paper session: Collaborative tools and environments for medieval scholarship

Many groups around the world are working to develop a new generation of collaborative tools and research environments, with potential wide applicability to medieval studies. This leads to questions about the nature of collaboration itself, and about useful models of collaboration. Reports form the coal face on collaborations which have, or have not, worked are welcome, as are demonstrations of tools and ruminations on the many faces of collaboration.

Again, please send inquiries and abstracts for 20-minute presentations to Peter Robinson at p.m.robinson@bham.ac.uk. Abstracts must be attached to a Participant Information Form, available in both MS Word and PDF formats from the Congress website: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF.