What is Seshat?
According to an apocryphal story, Lord Kelvin or as now believed, Albert A. Michelson, declared in 1900:
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
Is the fate of palaeography similar? In 1979 the distinguished palaeographer Bernhard Bischoff inadvertently touched on this question when he wrote in the introduction of his handbook that palaeography was being transformed in his time “from an art of seeing and sympathetic understanding” to “an art of measurement” (Paläographie des römischen Altertums und des abendländischen Mittelalters [Berlin, 1979], p. 17). The statement triggered heated reactions and defences of palaeography as an art of cultivated seeing. Our new digital tool Seshat is not intended to promote the idea that palaeography should be a purely quantitative discipline. But it does enable users to measure key features of scripts from high-quality images, which is both useful and desirable in the digital age.
Named after the Ancient Egyptian goddess of scribes, Seshat is a measurement tool with annotation features that make it possible to conduct a thorough palaeographical analysis of a digital object. It allows users to highlight textual regions, underline specific words or lines, insert comments, trace letterforms using adjustable pen angles (0°, 25°, 30°, 50°, and 80°), and excerpt data in different formats to be used as a dataset later. The tracing functionality supports the analysis of script ductus and scribal hand variation.

Taking inspiration from the first version of a software tool for the critical examination of historical handwriting called Graphoskop developed by Maria Gurrado and Giancarlo Lestingi (https://www.irht.cnrs.fr/fr/ressources/sites-web-outils-corpus/graphoskop), we have included a suite of measurement tools that calculate horizontal and vertical distances for particular script and page features: ascender and descender heights, interlinear spacing, margins, overall line heights, and inter-column spaces. A stroke angle measurement feature allows for precise documentation of letterform direction and inclination. Statistical tools automatically calculate averages, standard deviations, and mode values across measurements for both single pages and entire manuscripts.
Seshat is fully IIIF-compatible, enabling users to load manuscript images from major repositories such as the British Library, the Vatican Library, or other IIIF-compliant archives. The option to upload JPEG formatted images is also available. Image cropping functionality is built in, letting users isolate manuscript regions and export these selections in PNG or SVG formats, with or without annotations.

What were our goals when starting to develop this app?
When we started, our main goals were:·To provide a digital tool for precise annotation and measurement of palaeographic features (e.g. ductus, margins, letterforms).
• To simulate traditional palaeographic tracing methods (such as ductus analysis) in a digital environment by including adjustable pen angle tracing.
• To allow users to collect measurable data (distances, angles) and automatically generate statistical outputs to support comparative manuscript studies.
• To enable scholars to manipulate and export parts of manuscript images for publication or focused analysis.
• To ensure integration with IIIF resources for direct access to high-quality manuscript images without requiring local uploads.
Currently, Seshat includes all the functionalities listed above, and is already being applied successfully in internal research for ductus evaluation, scribal variation analysis, and manuscript layout studies.
Seshat in the Future
Seshat is not yet finished. Based on development and user feedback, we plan the following additional features:
Tracing
• Allow users to form strokes with a simulated quill, where the quill size is determined by selecting two points on the canvas in pixels. This size will be adjustable.
• Support saving both individual and clustered strokes together with the underlying cropped manuscript image.
Commenting
• Allow customization of comment text, including font family, font size, and colour, displayed on a transparent layer (removing the current speech bubble design).
• Enable adjustment of text appearance (font, size, colour) for clearer comment placement without obscuring manuscript details.
Measurement
• Integrate tracing and measurement tools to allow for linked analysis (e.g. measuring traced strokes).
• Provide pixel-based measurements that can be converted to standard units.
• Enable curve measurement and potentially measure nib (quill) width directly from the stroke trace data.
Alphabet selection
• Develop an alphabet selection tool to extract individual letter shapes defined by the user.
Moving forwards, we will be improving Seshat based on user feedback and will be doing our best to deliver a very user-friendly interface by spring 2026!
— Project eManuSkript Team