Material
This year, the Church Slavonic group will work on a selection of 11th-12th century East Slavic manuscripts. The manuscripts represent the earliest layer of the Church Slavonic written tradition in Rus’ and include a variety of texts connected to the religious life of the period:
- Gospel books (evangeliaria and lectionaries)
- Liturgical menaia (collections of saints’ lives and hymns arranged by month)
- Moral and encyclopedic miscellanies (e.g. the Izbornik of Svyatoslav of 1076 etc.)
The selected manuscripts have been published in diplomatic or critical editions, so participants will have access to a reference text to support their transcription work.
Please, note that the number of participants is limited to 15 people.
Tasks for the participants
Each participant will choose one manuscript excerpt (15 pages) that they will transcribe independently. Additionally, they will be expected to correct the transcription of one peer (also 15 pages). The resulting dataset will be published on Zenodo (with the names of its contributors) and may be used for the subsequent training of HTR models for early Cyrillic Church Slavonic scripts.
Participants will also read a small selection of research articles on HTR for Church Slavonic scripts, which will be briefly discussed during the group sessions.
Transcription Tools and Transcription Guidelines
The group will work with Transkribus. We will follow a (semi-)diplomatic transcription protocol: orthographically meaningful graphemes are preserved without normalization as attested in the manuscripts; abbreviations are not resolved, with the titlo or pokrytie marks retained in their original position; punctuation is selectively normalized. This protocol is designed to preserve the orthographic variation of the manuscripts, which carries significant linguistic and historical information for this regional tradition of Church Slavonic.
Requirements
We expect intermediate knowledge of Church Slavonic and a basic familiarity with Church Slavonic paleography.
No previous experience with HTR or Transkribus is required.
Supervisor(s)
Olga Kalashnikova
University of Naples-Orientale