Automated Dating of Medieval Manuscripts with a New Dataset

Boraq Madi, Nour Atamni, Vasily Tsitrinovich, Daria Vasyutinsky Shapira, Jihad El-Sana, Irina Rabaev

Abstract: Automated manuscript dating is a long-awaited valuable tool for scholars in their research of historical documents. This study presents a new dataset of medieval Hebrew manuscripts annotated with dates. Our initial experiments focus on documents written in the Ashkenazi square script, allowing us to refine our methodologies in a manageable setting before addressing more complex script types. Also, to accurately reflect the script’s historical evolution, we adopt a novel classification approach for time periods of varying lengths, which acknowledges the uneven development of the script over time. We perform extensive experimentation with a variety of deep-learning models and show that the regression approach is more appropriate for estimating the date of the manuscript compared to categorical classification.