WEBSITE Himanis / Home : a common database for the History of Medieval Europe [ Menus: Overview, Trésor des Chartes (Paris, AN, série JJ), Sources and Credits, Contact ]

stutzmann_himanis 2026-10-09T16:09:21+02:00 1 279767 CMS_Home https://heurist.huma-num.fr/heurist/?recID=279767&db=stutzmann_himanis WEBSITE Himanis / Home : a common database for the History of Medieval Europe [ Menus: Overview, Trésor des Chartes (Paris, AN, série JJ), Sources and Credits, Contact ] 2022-07-20 15:35:53 2026-10-07 10:55:40 public Himanis / Home : a common database for the History of Medieval Europe Access to the full text and the inventories of the "Trésor des chartes" registers (Paris, Archives Nationales, JJ 37 - JJ 211). Research funded by the European Joint Programming Initiative "Cultural Heritage" Himanis and Home (ANR-17-JPCH-0006) [{"name":"Page","type":"group","children":[{"name":"Content","type":"text","css":{"border-style":"none","display":"block","height":"90%"},"content":"<h1>From HIMANIS to HOME...</h1>\nArtificial Intelligence has unlocked the access to the text of medieval manuscripts! The partners of the European research project HIMANIS implemented, for the first time, the indexing and plain text querying of thousands of pages of medieval manuscripts. The large scale of the corpus and the possibility to search in plain text for handwritten sources are unheard of in medieval studies, so that the results present a major shift for the general public, historians and computer science. The challenge of multilingualism, script variation and abbreviations, which are crucial for HTR on medieval sources, has been successfully met.\nManuscripts are among the most important witnesses to our European shared cultural heritage. As for the Middle Ages, nearly one million manuscript books survive along with countless archival documents from a period stretching across more than a millennium. They are fully recognized by the researchers and by the large public as a precious and key access point to the rich history of Europe. Digitizing is not enough. In recent years, large quantities of historical handwritten documents are being scanned into digital images which are then made available through web sites of libraries and archives all over the world. Yet, the wealth of information conveyed by the text captured in these images remains largely inaccessible. Not only the presentation is partial, isolated and out of context when historical collections are scattered across several holding institutions, but also, and above all, beyond reach of the large public. There is no plain text and no tools associated with resources that are difficult to read even for researchers, although general users and researchers more and more expect to query handwritten resources in plain text like printed books.\nThe aim of the partners in HIMANIS is to develop automated methods to allow the users to search and to add value to mass-digitization and preservation efforts of Culture Heritage institutions. With this overarching goal, HIMANIS seeks to offer a novel search interface which provides a way to query the corpus by kewword (rather than providing a text transcription) and to fit the needs of the users by establishing a precision-recall tradeoff. HIMANIS also aims at identifying the different writers in medieval books and documents. And, it aims at creating new knowledge about the European middle Ages.\nHIMANIS is also about collaboration for Cultural Heritage: it associates Computer Science, Humanities and Culture Heritage institutions in order to generate new, research-based knowledge, to promote the sustainable use and management of cultural heritage by understanding the meanings that cultural heritage holds for people and how they perceive, use and interpret it, and meet societal challenges in promoting use and re-use of written cultural heritage. These new developments will be directly useful for any language, script, or image collection.\n \nBy now, HIMANIS has radically changed the way one can access the Cultural Heritage of the European Middle Ages. Indeed, it has:\n<ul>\n<li>created a unique digital collection for medieval studies, unique by its iconicity, its large scale, and its wealth of information, encompassing 80’000 images covering 200 years of royal administration and justice in France, concerning approximately all of Europe given the centrality of France in the international relations of the Middle Ages. This collection gathers the digital images of the Chancery collection and tools to access its textual data!</li>\n<li>enhanced traditional metadata by (a) applying OCR technologies to printed inventories; (b) applying HTR technologies to handwritten inventories; (c) transforming and converting existing XML-EAD metadata; (d) creating concordances between logical and physical structures of archives, e.g. a crosswalk from “act” to ‘folio number” and from “image name” to “folio number”;</li>\n<li>created and enhanced technologies to align scholarly digital editions with images;</li>\n<li>developed a learning data set (ground truth) and “optical models” to read medieval scripts;</li>\n<li>developed cost-effective solutions for querying large sets of handwritten document images. To this end, innovative keyword spotting, indexing and search methods have been developed, tested, adapted and/or scaled up to meet the real-world conditions required. Beyond traditional queries, HIMANIS has also implemented a lemmatized search interface;</li>\n<li>implemented a user-friendly access to the contents of this key resource to increase the knowledge of medieval history and promote ongoing research in comparative studies on state management and administration;</li>\n<li>automated methods for writer identification and automated clustering;</li>\n<li>implemented the IIIF protocol to present and query the large scale collection in order to (a) ensure the long term sustainability of the search interface, (b) promote interoperability, (c) provide a more user-friendly interface;</li>\n<li>published the result of the index as public domain resource.</li>\n</ul>\n \nThe HIMANIS partners have opened to the public their web-based search interface <a href=\"http://prhlt-kws.prhlt.upv.es/himanis/\">http://prhlt-kws.prhlt.upv.es/himanis/</a> (announced on 16 June 2017, <a href=\"https://himanis.hypotheses.org/105\">https://himanis.hypotheses.org/105</a>), then implemented crowdsourcing functionalities and added documents as they were delivered and processed by the French National Archive and the French National Library.\nThe corpus that is offered to the public is large, multilingual, and historically significant, namely it is the vast collection of registers produced by the French royal chancery in the 14th and 15th c. This vast collection possesses in France an iconic value. More broadly, for Europe, they represent, by their very existence, the creation and management of a centralized state on the continent as a consequence of the long-lasting wars between France and England. They are witness to modernization and rationalization of Late Medieval administration. Nevertheless, the size of this iconic corpus prevented scholars to study it as exhaustively as it ought to be. By now, several PhD students are starting using it to create new knowledge beyond the possible exploitation and analysis by HIMANIS partners.\nGiven the huge success of this implementation, two dedicated conferences have been organized by the partners and associated partners, to disseminate the results beyond the public of immediately concerned academics and scholars and raise awareness in a general public and for wider audience, ranging from curators in archives and libraries to historians. For the first time in scholarly research and thanks to HIMANIS, it is possible to create an “automated reading” and therefore also a “distant reading” on European archives and manuscripts of the Middle Ages. It radically changes and improves the way citizens and scholars can access our common Cultural Heritage.","dom_id":"cms-content-4"}],"folder":true,"dom_id":"cms-content-3","css":{}}] 2022-10-10 2022 10 10 279841 point POINT(2.348392 48.853495) 2-190 38808 c9e46d211a30358bf3f85889bbf3d995309847ce FRAN_0021_19816_L.jpg image/jpeg 99 2022-10-10 16:53:07 https://heurist.huma-num.fr/heurist/?db=stutzmann_himanis&file=c9e46d211a30358bf3f85889bbf3d995309847ce 38805 e58831070c1632c7d0924ac69cb4f4a7e0863d93 Health-8 application/octet-stream 2 2022-07-20 15:35:53 https://heurist.huma-num.fr/heurist/?db=stutzmann_himanis&file=e58831070c1632c7d0924ac69cb4f4a7e0863d93 279763 279762 371884 279761 38809 9435614f526511b8f1e4cfafe8b9ab30e43b32c1 FRCHANJJ_JJ056_0042V_A.jpg image/jpeg 378 2022-10-10 16:54:44 https://heurist.huma-num.fr/heurist/?db=stutzmann_himanis&file=9435614f526511b8f1e4cfafe8b9ab30e43b32c1 Trésor des chartes, Registres, Registers, French royal chancery, Middle Ages, Chancellerie royale française, Moyen Âge, Digital Humanities, Heurist, Research, Database, Open Data No Top of page, horizontal (default) No How to cite? Dominique Stutzmann (ed.), Himanis / Home : a common database for the History of Medieval Europe (2022), with contributions by Sébastien Hamel, Laura Lebarbey, Sergio Torres Aguilar, Paul Chaffenet, Virgile Reignier, Marguerite Vernet, Guillaume Faure. No 1