The Middle Dutch Manuscripts Surviving from the Carthusian Monastery of Herne (14th century): Constructing an Open Dataset of Digital Transcriptions

Kestemont, Mike

Title

Author

Kestemont, Mike

Abstract

A substantial collection of Middle Dutch manuscripts survives from the Carthusian monastery of Herne (Hérinnes-lez-Enghien) in nowadays Belgium. During the latter half of the fourteenth century, Herne served as a signi昀椀cant literary hotspot in the region around Brussels, with a devoted community of monks deeply involved in the production of (vernacular) texts and manuscripts, o昀琀en as collaborative e昀昀orts. The corpus o昀昀ers abundant material for the (computational) exploration of authorship, translation, and scribal cultures in the premodern Low Countries. Yet, much of this material has remained digitally inaccessible. Here we describe the creation of an almost exhaustive, open-access dataset comprising diplomatic transcriptions of all known Middle Dutch Herne manuscripts, acquired through handwritten text recognition. Apart from rich codicological and textual metadata, we include a normalized text layer (with expanded abbreviations), as well as a linguistic annotation layer (with lemmas and part of speech tags). We conclude by discussing our work against current trends in medievalist scholarship. The dataset is released together with this paper and we encourage its re-use in future research.

Language

English

Source (book)

Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2023 Paris, France, December 6-8, 2023 / Šeļa, Artjoms [edit.]; Jannidis, Fotis [edit.]; Romanowska, Iza [edit.]

Publication

Paris : Computational Humanities Research Conference , 2023

Volume/pages

p. 135-152

Faculty/Department				Faculty of Arts. Literature

Research group				Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Publication type				P3 Proceeding

Subject				Literature History

Affiliation				Publications with a UAntwerp address

Identifier

c:irua:201745

Creation

21.12.2023

Last edited

17.06.2024

To cite this reference

https://hdl.handle.net/10067/2017450151162165141