Margaret Rich Greer

This project develops automatic methods for analyzing the treasure-trove of Spanish Golden Age theater manuscripts and related archival documents. Our "cyber-paleography" effort builds a live, layered, virtual world on the web, open to librarians, scholars and students. A first layer connects digitally restored images of manucript pages to descriptions of the pen strokes on paper. Manual and automatic analysis of these descriptions yield profiles of the writers' handwriting styles and enable semi-automatic inferences, based on machine learning methods, about who wrote what and when. A second layer connects sources to individual and collective histories of the theater community. A third layer describes the techniques of cyber-paleography to both humanists and scientists.