Historia Scholastica

Participants

• Faculty: Dr. Elisa Barney Smith, Karen Wadley

Collaborators

• Boise State History Department

• Luleå Tekniska Universitet, Machine Learning group

Description

Historia Scholastica was written by Peter Comestor in the early 1170s. It was copied and reissued multiple times becoming a primary text used in university study in the Middle Ages. The edition of the book printed as an incunabula at the end of the 1400s is owned by Boise State University. It is written in an old Latin script with heavy use of scribal abbreviations. The HSP project since 2011 has manually transcribed and translated 70 of the 608 pages from Latin to English.  We have digitized the pages of the book and are developing OCR techniques to apply to the text that can operate with the old script and the scribal abbreviations. This will accelerate the ongoing effort to translate the text to English. This will be followed by textual historical and context analysis, and comparisons with other editions of the book. ​A user friendly display showing the stages of the work and the book in its original form along copies transcribed and translated will be produced to share the book and its content with the greater public.