Speaker
Description
The digitization and scholarly editing of Glagolitic texts are entering a new phase in which traditional philological practices increasingly intersect with automated text recognition and artificial intelligence. This paper reflects on recent experiences with the transcription, transliteration, and digital editing of Croatian Glagolitic manuscripts, focusing on the opportunities and limitations of current HTR and AI-based tools.
Existing HTR models have proved useful for certain types of Glagolitic, particularly the formal angular Glagolitic found in many liturgical manuscripts. Their applicability to non-liturgical manuscripts is considerably more limited, owing to the diversity of letterforms and writing styles, while reliable models for cursive Glagolitic are still largely lacking. Recent experiments with large language models likewise show that, despite their success with other historical scripts, they generally struggle to recognize Glagolitic.
These technological limitations intersect with a fundamental philological problem: Glagolitic texts are characterized by considerable linguistic and orthographic variation and do not conform to a single standardized transcriptional tradition. Models trained on particular philological practices may therefore encode assumptions that are appropriate for some texts but problematic when applied to others.
Drawing on examples from recent projects involving the digital edition of Glagolitic and Old Czech texts, this presentation considers the relationship between established philological methods and emerging technologies. The main question is: should traditional philological practices be adapted to the capabilities of available technologies, or should digital tools instead be developed to accommodate the requirements of philological practice? Ultimately, the paper argues for a dialogue between the two, in which technological solutions remain responsive to the linguistic, textual, and editorial diversity of historical sources.