One Year Anniversary of Project eManuSkript: Part One
In April 2024, a group of scholars and students, funded by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre, came together at the University of Göttingen’s Institute for Digital Humanities with an ambitious goal: to reimagine how medieval manuscripts can be taught, studied, and experienced in the digital age. Led by Dr. Anna Dorofeeva, Project eManuSkript has grown since then into a vibrant, interdisciplinary project that continues to evolve—shaped by its users, enriched by its team, and rooted in a shared commitment to accessibility and collaboration.
The Vision Behind eManuSkript
The idea was simple but important: manuscript studies, often remain difficult to access, especially for beginners or those outside of specialized institutions. Scholars might face barriers due to geographic distance, limited physical access to manuscripts, or a lack of training in palaeography or codicology.
Our goal was to build tools that would meet learners and researchers where they are—whether in the classroom, at an archive, or online. We wanted to create a digital platform that was not only technically sound but also inviting, accessible, flexible, and pedagogically grounded. The user experience and the needs of students in manuscript studies have driven the development of the project.
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What We’ve Built
Over the past year, the eManuSkript team has been developing a suite of interconnected tools designed to address a range of issues associated with teaching and learning medieval manuscripts. Each one tackles a different challenge, and together they form a single interface.
Mergen is our AI-based layout segmentation app. It detects key manuscript elements—both text and paratext—with exceptional speed and accuracy, outperforming other existing segmentation tools and datasets. By using Mergen, the user can build a research corpus of specific manuscript elements. Using a three-layer segmentation method, our team annotated a significant corpus of raw manuscript pages to make sure Mergen reaches its potential in the shortest time. We still continue to update Mergen’s database regularly for even better results. ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ
Proteus simplifies a complex task: working on texts that are hard-to-read, whether due to chemical damage or purposeful erasure, such as in palimpsests, by making use of multispectral imaging technology. With Proteus, users can generate enhanced images—for example, using pseudo-colour or PCA—that reveal hidden or faded script. Proteus can even enhance high resolution visible-light images, using power or contrasts. Currently, we are finetuning Proteus V3.0.
Seshat is an annotation-and-measurement tool that allows users to analyse historical scripts. Users upload the manuscript they want to study using a IIIF link. They can then trace letterforms, calculate letter size, generate statistical data such as stroke angle, and compare different scribal hands. The resulting data, such as tracing, measurements and image embeddings, can be exported to be analysed further. We are also working on a script recognition model to add a precise, compact model of Latin scripts to our web app. A downloadable version of Seshat will soon include trained models for text recognition.
Ceres &Libera are two connected applications for exploring medieval bookbinding. Ceres, allows users to generate customised templates to visualise medieval manuscript bookbindings. For this app, our team’s plan to document the spine and sewing structures of a medieval book have been supported by expert input from conservators at the Göttingen State and University Library. The second app, Libera, is an interactive application where users can build their own codex from bookblock to cover. With Libera, users will be able to follow simplified tutorials as they build their codex and can build visualizations with specialized terminology and professionally illustrated components.
Supporting these tools is a rich range of interactive tutorials—including images, videos and interactive games—as well as a historical timeline and canonical script alphabets with ductus practice options. Accessibility is built into every layer: visual alternatives for those with impairments, multimodal learning options, and a user-friendly design that reduces the barriers to working with manuscripts.
These applications reflect our experimental approach to manuscript studies. Despite the growing number of digitised collections, access is still limited by the high level of specialist knowledge required. Through regular team meetings, in-class experimentation, and constant dialogue between developers, scholars, and students, we’ve shaped tools that genuinely respond to user needs—pushing boundaries while remaining grounded in traditional scholarship.
Together, these five tools create a full digital environment for investigating the medieval manuscript book—from physical structure and visual layout to textual content and palaeographic detail. By April 2026, all applications will be available through our website, and our datasets and backend code will be archived openly via GitHub and Zenodo. This suite of tools and tutorials will be complemented by an extensive glossary and Zotero library. We hope this will empower others to build upon our work and bring manuscript studies fully into the digital age.
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People and Collaboration at the Heart
What truly powers Project eManuSkript is its team. Beginning as a group of ten, with backgrounds in history, digital humanities, computer science, German studies, English literature, and more, our team has changed over time, but what has remained consistent has been the interest the project has generated — from students to guest researchers, all enriching our ideas with fruitful support and feedback. Our collaboration is intentionally non-hierarchical and inclusive. We believe that the best solutions emerge from diverse perspectives and shared responsibility.
Team members contribute in many ways: designing user interfaces, labelling datasets, testing OCR models, writing documentation, or organizing outreach events. Each of us brings a unique angle, and we encourage constant feedback—especially from our fellow students at the Institute of Digital Humanities, who are both co-creators and core users of the tools.
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Challenges and Lessons Learned
Of course, no digital project is without hurdles. Training machine learning models on historical scripts has meant confronting the limits of existing datasets and annotation tools. Designing interfaces for a multilingual, cross-disciplinary audience has forced us to think carefully about clarity and adaptability. And balancing research with usability remains an ongoing effort.
But these challenges have been productive. They’ve taught us to take a step back and recalculate, document thoroughly, and centre accessibility at every stage. We’ve also learned the value of working in public: sharing early prototypes, inviting critique, and adapting based on what users actually need.
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What’s Next?
As we move into our second year, we’re expanding in different directions. This year, we’re refining our tools with the help of classroom testing, user studies, and more targeted community engagement. We are hoping that, by releasing our website for Project eManuSkript, we will encourage a larger public to explore our current work, both to offer constructive criticism and feedback on what we have accomplished so far and to measure their accessibility and practical usability for scholars and students from all around the world.
We are continuously working to make the best out of each app and expand the limits of our tutorials by going beyond the traditional approach. Going forward, we will continue to generate new ideas, to maintain outputs that are open, free, and adaptable, and, ultimately, to develop the best technologies we can for digital manuscript studies.
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A Thank You—and an Invitation
Dear Reader,
On this first anniversary, we want to thank everyone who has contributed to eManuSkript: our funders, testers, advisors, and especially the students who’ve helped shape the tools with their questions and insights.
This project is still growing, and we hope it continues to spark curiosity, empower learners, and connect people to the world of medieval manuscripts in new and meaningful ways.
Whether you’re a student, a teacher, a researcher, or just a manuscript enthusiast —welcome. You’re invited to explore, learn, and build with us.
Best wishes,
- – Project eManuSkript Team
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Yildiz Ashina Aleyna (May 19, 2025). One Year of eManuSkript: A Digital Journey into Manuscript Studies. Digital Palaeography. Retrieved October 10, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14j5l