Schoolchildren help reveal secrets of Vatican’s archives
Despite their name, the Vatican Secret Archives have been open to scholars since 1881. Even so, navigating the tens of thousands of musty tomes and manuscripts has proved difficult.
Now the Holy See is using artificial intelligence and local schoolchildren to unlock the mysteries of the tens of thousands of handwritten documents that occupy about 52 miles of shelves.
The archives are best-known in Britain for a letter from parliament urging the Pope to annul Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, as well as a letter from Mary, Queen of Scots written months before her execution.
However, only a negligible proportion of the documents has been scanned and made available online and even fewer have been made searchable, so remain hidden.
The In Codice Ratio project aims to correct that by using a transcription method that could also be applied to other collections. Its intention is to do for manuscripts, letters and diaries what Google Books has done for printed works.
Digitisation projects such as Google Books use ‘‘object character recognition’’ software, which identifies letters from the spaces between historical insights them. The software can transcribe clear modern handwriting but cannot reliably transcribe cursive handwriting because of the lack of spaces between letters.
Scientists from Roma Tre University and the Vatican developed a technique that does not look for whole letters but individual pen strokes.
The software connects these fragments to assemble whole letters and words. To train the software, the team asked teenagers at 24 Italian schools to complete a computer exercise in which they identified individual letters from a 13th-century manuscript by comparing them to reference specimens.
This enabled the algorithm to identify all the pen-stroke configurations a letter could take, enabling automated transcription with 96 per cent accuracy.
‘‘[At first] the idea of involving high-school students was considered foolish. But now the machine is learning thanks to their efforts,’’ Paolo Merialdo, of Roma Tre, said.
‘‘I like that a small and simple contribution by many people can indeed contribute to the solution of a complex problem.
‘‘It is amazing for us to bring these manuscripts back to life and make [them] available to everybody.’’ –