Peter Stokes
THIS PAGE IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED. For up-to-date research profiles and open-access publications see my online CV, ORCID profile or (up to 2017) King's College London profile:
- http://peterstokes.org/cv/
- https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9060-9340
- https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/peter-stokes(454fdb9e-d916-41a2-b3b6-419631596248).html
After Honours degrees in Classics and English Literature and in Computer Engineering, Peter Stokes completed a PhD at Cambridge on English palaeography of the early eleventh century. He held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in Palaeography at the Department of Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, where he developed new methods of quantitative and computer-based palaeography, then worked at the Centre for Computing in Humanities (CCH, now Department of Digital Humanities) at King's College London on the LangScape, Anglo-Saxon Cluster and Electronic Sawyer projects before being awarded a major research grant from the European Research Council for his DigiPal: Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic. This project, completed in September 2014, lead to two further major grants from the AHRC for collaborative projects in which he is Co-Investigator: The Conqueror’s Commissioners: Unlocking the Domesday Survey of South-West England (with the University of Oxford), and Models of Authority: Scottish Charters and the Emergence of Government, 1100–1250 (with the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge).
Major publications include English Vernacular Minuscule from Æthelred to Cnut, circa 990 – circa 1035 (Cambridge, 2014) and DigiPal, and he has also published on name-studies, lexicography, Anglo-Saxon charters, image-processing, and digital humanities, as well as palaeography. He is a correspondant scientifique at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (CNRS, Paris), and Chercheur invité (Invited Researcher) there in 2015. He lectures on the MA in Digital Humanities at King's College London, and has also lectured in palaeography and codicology, digital publishing, medieval history, and medieval Latin at the Universities of Cambridge, Leicester and the School of Advanced Studies in the University of London.
Other professional positions include:
- Elected member of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine
- Correspondant scientifique and, for two months in 2015, Chercheur invité (Invited Researcher) at the CNRS in Paris (Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes, UPR 841)
- Member, Équipe Humanités Numériques, Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM, CNRS/ENS, UMR 8132)
- Specialty Chief Editor of Digital Paleography and Book History, a Specialty Section of Frontiers in Digital Humanities
- Principal Coordinator of Medieval and Modern Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age (MMSDA), a five-day international training programme for PhD students.
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7848 2813
Address: Department of Digital Humanities
2nd Floor
26-29 Drury Lane
London, WC2B 5RL
- http://peterstokes.org/cv/
- https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9060-9340
- https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/peter-stokes(454fdb9e-d916-41a2-b3b6-419631596248).html
After Honours degrees in Classics and English Literature and in Computer Engineering, Peter Stokes completed a PhD at Cambridge on English palaeography of the early eleventh century. He held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in Palaeography at the Department of Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, where he developed new methods of quantitative and computer-based palaeography, then worked at the Centre for Computing in Humanities (CCH, now Department of Digital Humanities) at King's College London on the LangScape, Anglo-Saxon Cluster and Electronic Sawyer projects before being awarded a major research grant from the European Research Council for his DigiPal: Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic. This project, completed in September 2014, lead to two further major grants from the AHRC for collaborative projects in which he is Co-Investigator: The Conqueror’s Commissioners: Unlocking the Domesday Survey of South-West England (with the University of Oxford), and Models of Authority: Scottish Charters and the Emergence of Government, 1100–1250 (with the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge).
Major publications include English Vernacular Minuscule from Æthelred to Cnut, circa 990 – circa 1035 (Cambridge, 2014) and DigiPal, and he has also published on name-studies, lexicography, Anglo-Saxon charters, image-processing, and digital humanities, as well as palaeography. He is a correspondant scientifique at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (CNRS, Paris), and Chercheur invité (Invited Researcher) there in 2015. He lectures on the MA in Digital Humanities at King's College London, and has also lectured in palaeography and codicology, digital publishing, medieval history, and medieval Latin at the Universities of Cambridge, Leicester and the School of Advanced Studies in the University of London.
Other professional positions include:
- Elected member of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine
- Correspondant scientifique and, for two months in 2015, Chercheur invité (Invited Researcher) at the CNRS in Paris (Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes, UPR 841)
- Member, Équipe Humanités Numériques, Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM, CNRS/ENS, UMR 8132)
- Specialty Chief Editor of Digital Paleography and Book History, a Specialty Section of Frontiers in Digital Humanities
- Principal Coordinator of Medieval and Modern Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age (MMSDA), a five-day international training programme for PhD students.
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7848 2813
Address: Department of Digital Humanities
2nd Floor
26-29 Drury Lane
London, WC2B 5RL
less
InterestsView All (16)
Uploads
Papers by Peter Stokes
[Reproduced from the 'Introduction']
Within the discipline of palaeography, the ‘morphological’ approach tries to describe the letter-shape as a whole, so a letter may be described as a ‘Caroline a’ or as an ‘insular r’. Aspects of this approach are visible in almost all palaeographical handbooks, particularly those that provide alphabets or selections of letter-forms. An example is Albert Derolez’s, Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, which also provides a useful discussion of morphology as a palaeographical method.
Commonly, a morphological system of descriptors contains two main categories: One category is the grapheme or perhaps, more correctly, character: the letter as an abstract entity but with physical form, such as a, æ, or a single punctuation mark. The second category is the allograph, namely, a particular way of writing the letter; typical examples include ‘Caroline’ or ‘insular’.
A key question, given any system of descriptors, is to evaluate the relative importance of each of the components of this system. For example, it is well known among palaeographers that the grapheme a is very distinctive for late Anglo-Saxon minuscule (Ker 1957; Dumville 1988; Stokes 2005); however, subjective evaluation of distinctiveness could potentially be misleading. It is therefore quite useful to conduct a statistical analysis of significance, and potentially contribute thereby to the practice of palaeography, provided the results can be presented in a meaningful form.
In this work, we employ methods that are commonly used for mining insights from biological experiments regarding underlying genetic mechanisms. We show that in the context of palaeography such an approach also provides insightful observations."
significantly different version of the text has lain unnoticed. This second version is preserved in a copy made by John Joscelyn, Latin Secretary to Archbishop Matthew Parker. Among the material uniquely preserved in this copy are Old English charter bounds for Wyegate (GL), Cumbtune (Compton, GL?) and part of the bounds probably for Lydney (GL), as well as a reference to a grant by Bishop Werferth of Worcester. In this paper both versions of the document are discussed and are presented together for the first time, and a translation of the single sheet is provided. The history of the two versions is discussed in some detail, and the text of a twelfth-century letter which refers to the charter is also edited and translated."
The Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London has developed a new web-based digital resource articulated around the Anglo-Saxon charters as core material, through which the data and the corresponding metadata embodied in each of the component projects is made available together in a thematic cluster. It serves as a unified point of entry into the individual resources, allowing users to see contextually appropriate data from each project in juxtaposition and to access union indexes generated across the data in each resource. It also provides a platform for exploring different approaches to cross-searching.
The aggregation of data follows a dynamic model, taking into account the fact that the component resources will continue to be updated and evolve. We expect that the project will have a dual impact: in the development of a technical framework for the integration of disparate resources; and as a possible model for gathering textual and contextual information around medieval charters.
[Reproduced from the 'Introduction']
Within the discipline of palaeography, the ‘morphological’ approach tries to describe the letter-shape as a whole, so a letter may be described as a ‘Caroline a’ or as an ‘insular r’. Aspects of this approach are visible in almost all palaeographical handbooks, particularly those that provide alphabets or selections of letter-forms. An example is Albert Derolez’s, Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, which also provides a useful discussion of morphology as a palaeographical method.
Commonly, a morphological system of descriptors contains two main categories: One category is the grapheme or perhaps, more correctly, character: the letter as an abstract entity but with physical form, such as a, æ, or a single punctuation mark. The second category is the allograph, namely, a particular way of writing the letter; typical examples include ‘Caroline’ or ‘insular’.
A key question, given any system of descriptors, is to evaluate the relative importance of each of the components of this system. For example, it is well known among palaeographers that the grapheme a is very distinctive for late Anglo-Saxon minuscule (Ker 1957; Dumville 1988; Stokes 2005); however, subjective evaluation of distinctiveness could potentially be misleading. It is therefore quite useful to conduct a statistical analysis of significance, and potentially contribute thereby to the practice of palaeography, provided the results can be presented in a meaningful form.
In this work, we employ methods that are commonly used for mining insights from biological experiments regarding underlying genetic mechanisms. We show that in the context of palaeography such an approach also provides insightful observations."
significantly different version of the text has lain unnoticed. This second version is preserved in a copy made by John Joscelyn, Latin Secretary to Archbishop Matthew Parker. Among the material uniquely preserved in this copy are Old English charter bounds for Wyegate (GL), Cumbtune (Compton, GL?) and part of the bounds probably for Lydney (GL), as well as a reference to a grant by Bishop Werferth of Worcester. In this paper both versions of the document are discussed and are presented together for the first time, and a translation of the single sheet is provided. The history of the two versions is discussed in some detail, and the text of a twelfth-century letter which refers to the charter is also edited and translated."
The Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London has developed a new web-based digital resource articulated around the Anglo-Saxon charters as core material, through which the data and the corresponding metadata embodied in each of the component projects is made available together in a thematic cluster. It serves as a unified point of entry into the individual resources, allowing users to see contextually appropriate data from each project in juxtaposition and to access union indexes generated across the data in each resource. It also provides a platform for exploring different approaches to cross-searching.
The aggregation of data follows a dynamic model, taking into account the fact that the component resources will continue to be updated and evolve. We expect that the project will have a dual impact: in the development of a technical framework for the integration of disparate resources; and as a possible model for gathering textual and contextual information around medieval charters.
Palaeography as a discipline typically involves difficult, complex, and time-consuming tasks, often involving reference to a variety of linguistic and archaeological data sets, and the invocation of previous knowledge of similar documentary material. Due to the involved reading process, it is difficult to record how the final interpretation of the document was reached, and which competing hypotheses were presented, adopted, or discarded in the process. It is also difficult to acknowledge and present the probabilities, and uncertainties, which were called on to resolve a final reading of a text. As a result, paleography is an allegedly ‘authoritarian’ discipline, which depends on ‘faith’ or ‘dogma’ but is based on ‘informed guesswork’.
Partly in response to this, scholars world-wide have begun to develop and employ new technologies and computer-based methods for palaeographic research. This approach, often referred to as ‘digital palaeography’, aims to improve and enhance the traditional methods. Its goal is to help efficiently solve palaeographic issues and/or provide more quantitative evidence to palaeographical arguments, and in consequence to cater for a better understanding of our cultural heritage.
Such computational methods as proposed by digital palaeography have been the subject of much research in the last few years; however, as image analysis and statistical inference techniques improve, we expect the field to evolve quickly:
1. Most of the current research has been theoretical or applied only to small cases; however, a major strength of computational methods is their scalability.
2. The applications to date have also focused almost exclusively on the question of scribal identity, ignoring other aspects of palaeographical research. The emergence of digital historical corpora might enable much broader expert systems.
3. Current efforts tend to view letter-forms as objects outside the manuscript or documentary context in which they were written, but palaeographers have long understood that handwriting depends heavily on the context in which it is produced.
4. Much more significantly, current methods tend to make the computer a ‘black box’ which receives images of manuscripts at one end and returns a classification of the handwriting at the other, masking out underlying dependencies on very subtle and often unstated assumptions about the underlying data. Usually scholars cannot evaluate the ‘black box’ and so are rightly reluctant to accept its results, which leads to the need to adopt more suitable statistical techniques that can output palaeographical data in a way which scholars can understand, evaluate, and trust.
The participants of the workshop will discuss the potential of such methods not only in order to improve palaeographic research on its leading, traditional questions but also to identify questions one would not have asked without the emergence of innovative methodology.
Participants are J. Patrick Hornbeck II (Fordham University, New York), Pavlina Rychterová (Österreichische Akademie der Wisenschaften, Wien), Peter A. Stokes (King's College London), and David John Wallace (University of Pennsylvania).
The proposed paper will present some of the first systematic work on the degree of variation in the morphology of this script by drawing together the author’s previous and current studies, particularly his ‘Digital Resource for Palaeography’ (DigiPal) and a monograph in preparation on the early development of English Vernacular minuscule. The degree of variation in the surviving scribal hands will be presented using innovative visualisations through the ‘Digital Resource’, and the resulting evidence will be analysed in comparison with the Latin script of the same period. The results will be discussed in their historical context, along with the implications for scribal practice and brief reference to the resulting difficulties in dating, and in the characterisation and attempted taxonomies of this script and indeed of script more generally.
References
Bishop, T.A.M. and P. Chaplais. 1957. Facsimiles of English Royal Writs to A. D. 1100, presented to Vivian Hunter Galbraith. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ker, N.R. 1985. Books, Collectors and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage, ed. by A.G. Watson. London: Hambledon.
Stokes, P.A. 2006. English Vernacular Script: ca 990 – ca 1035. Unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. Cambridge.
Stokes, P.A. et al. 2011–. Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic (‘DigiPal’). King’s College London. <http://www.digipal.eu/>
The proposed paper will present some of the first systematic work on the degree of variation in the morphology of this script by drawing together the author’s previous and current studies, particularly his ‘Digital Resource for Palaeography’ (DigiPal) and a monograph in preparation on the early development of English Vernacular minuscule. The degree of variation in the surviving scribal hands will be presented using innovative visualisations through the ‘Digital Resource’, and the resulting evidence will be analysed in comparison with the Latin script of the same period. The results will be discussed in their historical context, along with the implications for scribal practice and brief reference to the resulting difficulties in dating, and in the characterisation and attempted taxonomies of this script and indeed of script more generally.
References
- Bishop, T.A.M. and P. Chaplais. 1957. Facsimiles of English Royal Writs to A. D. 1100, presented to Vivian Hunter Galbraith. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Ker, N.R. 1985. Books, Collectors and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage, ed. by A.G. Watson. London: Hambledon.
- Stokes, P.A. 2006. English Vernacular Script: ca 990 – ca 1035. Unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. Cambridge.
- Stokes, P.A. et al. 2011–. Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic (‘DigiPal’). King’s College London. <http://www.digipal.eu/>
'The London Anglo-Saxon Symposium (LASS) aims to provide a forum for the multidisciplinary discussion of Anglo-Saxon topics in a relaxed and engaging atmosphere. LASS will bring together internationally renowned experts and interested members of the public, an interaction that promises to be highly informative and enjoyable for everyone involved.
This year the focus will be on the origins of the Anglo-Saxons and the beginnings of their culture. The 2012 LASS will include the following sessions, which will consist of short papers and plenty time for questions and discussion:
Session 1: The origins of the Anglo-Saxons: historical and an archaeological perspectives. Led by Dr Stephen Baxter (King's College London) and Prof. Andrew Reynolds (University College London).
Session 2: The English language: origins and early ways of writing. Led by Dr Sara M. Pons-Sanz (University of Westminster) and Dr Peter Stokes (King's College London).
Session 3: The early Anglo-Saxon economy and its literary representations. Led by Dr Gareth Williams (British Museum) and Dr Jennifer Neville (Royal Holloway College)
Session 4: Anglo-Saxon culture and its modern reinterpretations. Led by Professor Richard North (University College London) and Dr Fiona Sampson (Kingston University).'
Audience. The workshop will concentrate on modelling and representation of the book in digital format. As such, the target audience is scholars looking to design digital resources for academic research, although other groups would also be interested, such as librarians or archivists who plan to introduce digitisation projects. Participants are also encouraged to bring their own examples of challenging or problematic material for discussion.
Duration. This is a full-day workshop, consisting of about six hours of content plus lunch and coffee breaks.
Outline
Morning: Analysis and Modelling
• General Principles. The need to make content explicit to the computer
• Why digitise at all?
• Specific problems of material culture: how to capture and represent in ‘immaterial’ digital form?
• Analysis: understanding the objects, different points of view, different users, different research questions; practical exercises
• Modelling: how to capture these features? how to “teach” the computer to handle the book? practical exercises
Afternoon: Complexities
• Archaeology of the book: rebinding, additions/cancellations, annotations, rearranging…
• ‘Difficult’ formats: rolls, patches, fragments, disjoint pieces (sheets of paper, backs of envelopes…), …
• Participants’ examples
• Other topics, in brief or depending on participants’ interest:
o Reading environment, audience and usage. Who? When? Where? In what context?
o Cultural status. Size, weight, paper quality, cost…
o Provenance, glosses/annotations, library/ownership marks, dealer codes, …
o Sustainability; standards. Can we separate content from presentation?
• Final Case Study – Specialist Visualisation in the DigiPal project
• ASChart presents texts of charters in TEI XML dating to AD 900 with detailed diplomatic markup.
• PASE is a prosopographical database which features charters as a significant proportion of its primary sources.
• LangScape presents the charter bounds in TEI XML with detailed linguistic markup.
• eSawyer presents Sawyer’s handlist of charters; it now also includes texts and translations where available but these are taken from a range of sources and with minimal markup.
• ASCluster uses web services to provide a single point of access for queries across the other four projects. A sub-project involved creating a single TEI-compliant model to integrate ASChart, LangScape and eSawyer.
The proposed poster will present each of these projects in brief, illustrating which aspects of the corpus they provide to researchers and how they meet research needs both individually and in combination, and how they come together through the Anglo-Saxon Cluster.
The paper will be followed by a demonstration of a prototype developed for the ‘Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic’ project developed by Peter Stokes. Funded by the European Research Council, it aims to provide new ways of exploring visual and verbal information about handwriting and its manuscript context.