In Codice Ratio is a research project designed to study and use novel techniques such as Optical Character Recognition and Artificial Intelligence to digitize works in the Vatican Apostolic Archive,[1][2] most of which is handwritten.[3][4]

History

edit

In 2017, a project based in Roma Tre University called In Codice Ratio began using artificial intelligence and optical character recognition to attempt to transcribe more documents from the archives.[3][5] While character-recognition software is adept at reading typed text, the cramped and many-serifed style of medieval handwriting makes distinguishing individual characters difficult for the software.[6] Many individual letters of the alphabet are often confused by human readers of medieval handwriting, let alone a computer program. The team behind In Codice Ratio tried to solve this problem by developing a machine-learning software that could parse this handwriting. Their program eventually achieved 96% accuracy in parsing this type of text.[7]

References

edit
  1. ^ Firmani, Donatella; Maiorino, Marco; Merialdo, Paolo; Nieddu, Elena (2018-03-01). "Towards Knowledge Discovery from the Vatican Secret Archives. In Codice Ratio - Episode 1". Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining. pp. 263–272. arXiv:1803.03200. doi:10.1145/3219819.3219879. ISBN 9781450355520. S2CID 3772349.
  2. ^ "Towards Knowledge Discovery from the Vatican Secret Archives. In Codice Ratio". SIGKDD - KDD 2018. Retrieved 2021-03-25.
  3. ^ a b Kean, Sam (2018-04-30). "Artificial Intelligence Is Cracking Open the Vatican's Secret Archives". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2021-03-25.
  4. ^ Firmani, Donatella; Merialdo, Paolo; Nieddu, Elena; Scardapane, Simone (December 2017). "In Codice Ratio: OCR of Handwritten Latin Documents using Deep Convolutional Networks".
  5. ^ Firmani, D.; Merialdo, P.; Nieddu, E.; Scardapane, S. (2017). "In codice ratio: OCR of handwritten Latin documents using deep convolutional networks" (PDF). International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage. pp. 9–16.
  6. ^ "AI tackles the Vatican's secrets". MIT Technology Review. 15 March 2018. Retrieved 27 November 2018.
  7. ^ Firmani, Donatella; Merialdo, Paolo; Maiorino, Marco (25 September 2017). "In Codice Ratio: Scalable Transcription of Vatican Registers". ERCIM News. Retrieved 27 November 2018.
edit