Davide Awarded Visiting Research Fellowship at UPenn

PhD candidate Davide Pafumi has been awarded a Manuscript Data as Collections Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Davide is the only fellow to receive this honour before completing his PhD, a recognition of both his academic credentials and his familiarity with the project.

During his fellowship at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Davide experimented with multiple strategies for generating high-quality ground-truth data in order to train the most robust model possible across a corpus of eleven manuscripts. He ultimately fine-tuned Catmus v1.6.0 using a series of high-resolution images from English vernacular manuscripts in the BiblioPhilly collection, primarily written in Anglicana script.

Working chiefly with Philadelphia, Rosenbach, MS 1084/1 (olim Phillips 8137) and Philadelphia, Rosenbach, MS 1084/2 (olim Phillips 8136), as well as Lehigh, Codex MS 7, Davide developed a Handwritten Text Recognition model that achieved 99% accuracy across Middle English, Latin, and French materials.