On‑line transcriptions: Palaeography e‑learning in European archives

Abstract

Palaeography, a science that, in its practical aspect, is devoted to the teaching of reading ancient manuscripts, regardless of their language, has traditionally been associated with the courses of History and Archival Sciences, confined to academic banks, and seen as auxiliary science. It is within the scope of the crowdsourcing projects of documentary transcriptions that we see arise manuals and courses of online palaeography. The present work seeks to identify the online formative offer of medieval and modern palaeography courses, namely those promoted by the Portuguese, Spanish, English and French local and regional archives associated with these projects. It is intended to understand how the reading palaeography is developed by the archives, to understand which norms are used, who makes transcription manuals, to which interests group are they directed, which typologies are more available, periodicity of the courses / provision of the images for transcriptions, and, finally, realize what happens to the transcripts. It concludes with an analysis of the contribution of these projects to the development of reading palaeography, and, more generally, to the history of graphic culture.