Arbor vitae crucifixae Iesu by Ubertino of Casale transcribed with Transkribus

Anna Ledzińska

The paper presents the preparation of the transcription of Arbor vitae crucifixae Christi - a monumental 14th-century book written by Ubertino of Casale. The title task is part of the ongoing project intituled: The >Liber< of Angela of Foligno and heterodox movements in Umbria in the years 1270-1320. My main responsibility in the project is to study connections between the ideas of Angela and those of Spiritual Franciscans as described by Ubertino (Marini 1999) using philological methods including natural language processing. The second objective is to prepare a simple edition of the Arbor, which will be available online in open access.

Therefore, this presentation tends to describe the choices made to obtain a text on the one hand apt to further detailed digital processing in the project, and on the other, accessible and usable for different scientific purposes. So firstly, in lack of critical edition and having considered the textual tradition (Ruiz 2014) the Venetian old print book from 1485 is chosen as a basic source of the text (Davies 1961). Secondly, it is decided to transcribe it with Transkribus (Nockels 2022) - the platform for AI-powered text recognition of historical documents and the paper outlines subsequent stages of this task: preparation of the PDF file to the optical recognition, training of the neural network to get the HTR+ model, applying the model and its effects. Thirdly, some solutions have been found for the standardization of spelling and punctuation marks, which is crucial for later lemmatization and morphological analysis (Piotrowski 2012, 69-100).

From time to time there are reports of ongoing work on the critical edition of the Arbor, but the enormous size of the book and the rich manuscript tradition mean that this work is prolonged. Thus, other forms of making the text available seem worth considering, especially as modern digital tools such as Transkibus can be of invaluable help in this regard.

References:

• Marini, A. Ubertino e Angela: l’„Arbor vitae” e il „Liber”, in: Angele de Foligno. Le dossier, ed. G. Barone, J. Dalarun, Rome 1999, pp. 319- 344
• Martinez Ruiz, C.M. Historia y processo redaccional del „Arbor vitae”, in: Ubertino da Casale. Atti del XLI convegno internazionale, Spoleto 2014, pp. 113-147
• Nockels, J. Gooding, P. Ames, S. Terras, M. Understanding the application of handwritten text recognition technology in heritage contexts: a systematicreview of Transkribus in published research, Archival Science 22 (2022), pp. 367–39
• Piotrowski, M. Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts, Toronto 2012
• Ubertino de Casali, Arbor vitae crucifixae Iesu, [reprinted] intr. Ch. T. Davies, Torino 1961