III: Small: Medieval Unicorn: Toward Enhanced Understanding of Virtual Manuscripts on the Grid in the Twenty-First Century

计算使历史文献的研究发生了革命性的变化，在跨学科技术/领域小组以及个人学者和研究人员的使用和重要性方面正在迅速增长。伊利诺伊大学的一个跨学科团队提议研究和开发网络工具，用于探索性的视觉研究和对大量中世纪受试者的定量分析。该项目将重点放在手稿中嵌入的视觉图像以及分析工具将需要大量计算资源和可扩展的算法。测试集将是弗罗伊萨特编年史的数字化副本，这是一套中世纪手稿，可通过全球大学网络网格进行研究和教学，并可通过虚拟牛皮纸(由英国谢菲尔德大学开发，由英国艺术与人文工程和物理科学实验电子科学计划资助)访问。拟议活动产生的更广泛的科学影响预计将体现在新的方法、可扩展的算法上。这项工作还将提供新的探索性框架，支持与研究广泛、困难和复杂的主题有关的问题，如作为中世纪晚期巴黎图书贸易文物的手稿的组成和结构(抄本学)，以及确定特定艺术家的特征风格和肖像签名。这项研究将有助于建立一个新的学术机构，试图定义书籍是如何制作的，它们是如何流通的，以及它们在中世纪晚期的文化价值是什么。

Computation has revolutionized the study of historic documents and is growing rapidly in terms of use and importance to interdisciplinary technology/domain groups and individual scholars and researchers. An interdiscipinary team at the University of Illinois proposes to research and develop cyber tools for exploratory visual studies and quantitative analyses of large volumes of midieval manuscipts. The project will focus on visual imagery embedded in thes manuscripts and where the analysis tools will require large amounts of computational resources and scalable algorithms. The test collection will be digitized copies of Froissart's Chronicles, a set of midieval manuscripts available for reserch and teaching over the Worldwide Universities Network grid and accessible through Virtual Vellum ( developed at the University of Sheffield, UK, and funded by the UKs Arts and Humanities and Engineering and Physical Sciences experimental e-Science program.) The broader scientific impacts resulting from the proposed activities are expected to be in new methodologies, scalable algorithms. The work will also provide new exploratory frameworks that will support questions related to studying broad, difficult and complex topics such as the composition and structure (codicology) of manuscripts as cultural artifacts of the book trade in later medieval Paris and identifying the characteristic styles and iconographic signatures of particular artists. The research will contribute to a body of recent scholarship that seek to define how books were made, how they circulated, and what their cultural value was in the late medieval period.