Manuscripts are among the most important witnesses to our European shared cultural heritage. Despite a large digitization, the wealth of their content remains largely inaccessible : current handwritten text recognition technology is not accurate enough to allow full text search. This situation raises the need of searching approaches specifically designed for text images.
HIMANIS aims at developing cost-effective solutions for querying large sets of handwritten document images.
a new indexing/searching technology for historical manuscripts
a new paradigm to study our historical heritage, as conveyed by manuscripts, by using full text search technology.
a new vision of the raise of nation states in Europe via a new study of the corpus under this paradigm.
The “Tresor des Chartes” is the most valuable and iconic archive of the French kings and has been built as a collection as early as in the 13th c. Within the “Tresor”, the collection of medieval registers (aka “Chancery corpus”) stand out. They keep record of the charters, grants and privileges given by the king of France and were produced directly by the French royal chancery. Dating from 1302 to 1483, they contain ca. 68,000 charters and documents. This large and iconic collection bears witness to the rationalization of late medieval administration and is a key source to our understanding of medieval Europe and the rise of centralized nation state on the continent as a consequence of the long lasting wars between France and England.
The 60,000 most relevant pages of the Trésor des Chartes have been made searchable thanks to a novel indexing technique specially designed in HIMANIS for manuscript images. A simple, preliminary interface to this index is provided here.
Enter your query
you can search for individual words and word combinations. More details about how to use this search interface, along with examples of queries, can be found here
CNRS institute devoted to fundamental research on medieval manuscripts and early printed books.
The global leader in handwriting recognition, text extraction and document classification software.
Universitat Politècnica de València research center dedicated to Multimodal Interaction, Pattern Recognition, Image Processing and Language Processing
Research center covering Cognitive Modeling, Multi-Agent Systems, Autonomous Perceptive Systems, Sensory Cognition.
Collect, preserve, enrich and make available the French national documentary heritage