Á fæðingardegi Árna Magnússonar handritasafnara 13. nóvember gengst Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum árlega fyrir svokölluðum Árna Magnússonar fyrirlestri. Fyrirlesturinn er auglýstur á vef stofnunarinnar. Fyrirlesari að þessu sinni er Peter Stokes. Fyrirlestur hans nefnist „Nýjar aðferðir og spurningar í tengslum við stafrænar handritarannsóknir".

Peter Stokes er rannsóknarprófessor í stafrænum hugvísindum með áherslu á söguleg rit og ber ábyrgð á verkefnum í stafrænum hugvísindum í Laboratoire Archéologie et Philologie d'Orient et d‘Occident (AOROC, UMR 8546), Section des Sciences Historiques et Philologiques við École Pratique des Hautes Études – Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL). Í rannsóknum sínum sameinar hann skriftarfræði, stafræn hugvísindi og tölvunarfræði, og nú um stundir leggur hann mesta áherslu á fræðileg og hagnýt vandamál varðandi lýsingu og greiningu á rithöndum en einnig notkun mismunandi letur- eða skriftartegunda samtímis um víða veröld.

Um fyrirlesturinn á ensku:

New Methods, New Questions in Digital Approaches to Manuscript Studies

Now that enormous numbers of manuscripts are being digitised and made available online, the question is increasingly being asked how best to use this material. Much of the focus to date has been on processing digital images to semi-automate work such as transcription, layout analysis and identifying scribes or scripts, and significant advances have been made here. However, scholars have also noted for some time now that the image of the page is only one of many aspects of the book, raising the question how to better integrate all the elements of manuscript studies and book history. Perhaps more importantly, digital and computational approaches not only provide new methods but also raise new questions about old ones. Digital and computational methods combined with principles such as Linked Open Data raise the possibility of a transversal palaeography that allows comparison across very different scripts and writing-systems, but to acheive this we need first to answer a number of fundamental questions, ranging from what exactly we do when identifying scribal hands to what, exactly, is the letter a.