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Historical ciphered manuscripts are documents that were typically used in sensitive communications within military and diplomatic contexts or among members of secret societies. These secret messages were concealed by inventing a method of…
Annual astrological calendars, practica and prognostications became widespread publications in Europe after the invention of printing presses in the 15th century. Using the national language instead of Latin, the language of the scientists,…
This paper presents an analysis of the star atlas included in the medieval Chinese manuscript (Or.8210/S.3326), discovered in 1907 by the archaeologist Aurel Stein at the Silk Road town of Dunhuang and now held in the British Library.…
In this paper, we present Demystify, a general tool for creating human-interpretable step-by-step explanations of how to solve a wide range of pen and paper puzzles from a high-level logical description. Demystify is based on Minimal…
The recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution has opened transformative possibilities for the humanities, particularly in unlocking the visual-artistic content embedded in historical illuminated manuscripts. While digital archives now…
Encoded (or ciphered) manuscripts are a special type of historical documents that contain encrypted text. The automatic recognition of this kind of documents is challenging because: 1) the cipher alphabet changes from one document to…
The Fibonacci numbers are familiar to all of us. They appear unexpectedly often in mathematics, so much there is an entire journal and a sequence of conferences dedicated to their study. However, there is also another sequence of numbers…
Einstein's research manuscripts provide important insights into his exceptional creativity. At the same time, they can present difficulties for a publication in the documentary edition of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE). The…
Handwritten text recognition and optical character recognition solutions show excellent results with processing data of modern era, but efficiency drops with Latin documents of medieval times. This paper presents a deep learning method to…
In medieval India, the Marathi language was written using the Modi script. The texts written in Modi script include extensive knowledge about medieval sciences, medicines, land records and authentic evidence about Indian history. Around 40…
A pioneering rule-based mechanical translation system (precursor of modern RBMTs) was first presented in December 1929 by its inventor, Federico Pucci, who later published the full method in a book titled "Il traduttore meccanico ed il…
Conway's Doomsday Algorithm (1973) determines the day of the week for any date in the Gregorian calendar via three additive components: a century anchor, a year offset, and a month-day offset. The century anchor is a fixed four-entry table.…
European libraries and archives are filled with enciphered manuscripts from the early modern period. These include military and diplomatic correspondence, records of secret societies, private letters, and so on. Although they are enciphered…
The earliest extant Chinese characters originate from oracle bone inscriptions, which are closely related to other East Asian languages. These inscriptions hold immense value for anthropology and archaeology. However, deciphering oracle…
Cuneiform tablets, emerging in ancient Mesopotamia around the late fourth millennium BCE, represent one of humanity's earliest writing systems. Characterized by wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, these artifacts provided insight into…
The work in this paper describes the training and evaluation of machine learning (ML) techniques for the classification of cuneiform signs. There is a lot of variability in cuneiform signs, depending on where they come from, for what and by…
We introduce in this paper a new dataset of annotated pages from books of hours, a type of handwritten prayer books owned and used by rich lay people in the late middle ages. The dataset was created for conducting historical research on the…
A permutation code is a nonlinear code whose codewords are permutation of a set of symbols. We consider the use of permutation code in the deletion channel, and consider the symbol-invariant error model, meaning that the values of the…
Ancient Chinese texts present an area of enormous challenge and opportunity for humanities scholars interested in exploiting computational methods to assist in the development of new insights and interpretations of culturally significant…
To facilitate the reuse of existing charts, previous research has examined how to obtain a semantic understanding of a chart by deconstructing its visual representation into reusable components, such as encodings. However, existing…