VIDEO: AI Meets Medieval Studies at Notre Dame

"The amount of writing produced on physical media since antiquity is staggering, and very little of it is available to scholars and the public," says Walter Scheirer, Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Notre Dame. Scheirer and his lab are pioneering a new interdisciplinary effort as they apply new AI technologies to decode this wealth of written materials and make it more accessible. 

"There simply aren't enough paleographers on the planet," Sheirer explains, to transcribe all of these writings, but thankfully, AI can help. Advances in machine learning technology now allow us to transcribe digital images into digital text allowing machines to serve as digital paleographers of texts in languages such as Latin or Ge'ez.

Read more about Professor Scheirer's exciting work.