Goals

In Codice Ratio is a research project that aims at developing novel methods and tools to support content analysis and knowledge discovery from large collections of historical documents. The goal is to provide humanities scholars with novel tools to conduct data-driven studies over large historical sources. The project concentrates on the collections of the Vatican Secret Archives, one of the largest and most important historical archive in the world. In an extension of 85 kilometres of shelving, it maintains more than 600 archival collections containing historical documents on the Vatican activities, such as, all the acts promulgated by the Vatican, account books, correspondence of the popes, starting from the eighth century.

Handwritten Text Recognition

We are developing a full-fledged system to automatically transcribe the contents of the manuscripts. We follow a novel approach, based on character segmentation. Our idea is to govern imprecise character segmentation by considering that correct segments are those that give rise to a sequence of characters that more likely compose a Latin word. We have designed a principled solution that relies on convolutional neural networks and statistical language models.

Experiments

We have experimented our approach on the Vatican Registers of the Vatican Secret Archives. These documents record the inbound and outbound correspondence of the popes: political letters that testify the broad activities of the popes in the ecclesiastical and temporal spheres; authoritative opinions on legal issues; documents addressed to sovereigns, religious and political institutions scattered throughout the globe; correspondence relating to the harvest of tithes and tributes due to the Church. Never having been transcribed in the past, these documents are of unprecedented historical relevance. Preliminary results are encouraging.

Team

Per aspera ad astra

Serena Ammirati

Serena Ammirati

Principal investigator (Humanities)

Roma Tre University

Paolo Merialdo

Paolo Merialdo

Principal investigator (Computer science))

Roma Tre University

Marco Maiorino

Marco Maiorino

Vatican Secret Archives

Donatella Firmani

Donatella Firmani

Roma Tre University

Francesca Galli

Francesca Galli

Roma Tre University

Elena Nieddu

Roma Tre University

Simone Scardapane

Simone Scardapane

La Sapienza University of Rome

Collaborators
(Graduate and Undergraduate Students)

Ad impossibilia nemo tenetur

Marco Miglionico

(Paleorgrapher)

Riccardo D'angelo

(Developer)

Gianlorenzo Di Donato

(Developer)

Roberta Valenti

(Developer)

High School Students and Professors

Ad maiora

Martina Fabrizi
Clarissa Persico
Benedetta De Feo
Alessia Sallustro
Eleonora Ubaldi
Giovanni Del Vecchio
Georgiana Sandu
Andrea Maria Mariani
Alice Vari
Andrea Buscemi
Davide Zaccaria
Clarissa Catapano
Deana Rosati
Mattia Egidi
Davide Antonelli
Francesco Randolfi
Francesca Fasulo
Matteo Valensise

News

Ipse dixit

Fundings

Reddite quae sunt Caesaris Caesari

LazioInnova: Programma Strategico Regionale per la ricerca, l'innovazione ed il trasferimento tecnologico 2017-2019 Legge Regionale n. 13 del 04/08/2008

UniversitĂ  degli Studi Roma Tre: Call for Ideas 2018