Steps Towards Mining Manuscript Images for Untranscribed Texts: A Case Study From the Syriac Collection at the Vatican Library

Digital libraries and databases of texts are invaluable resources for researchers, yet their reliance onprinted editions can lead to significant gaps and potentially exclude works without printed reproduc-tions. The Simtho database of Syriac serves as a pertinent example: it is derived primarily from OCR ofscholarly editions, but how representative are these of the language’s extensive literary tradition, trans-mitted and preserved in manuscript form for centuries? Taking the Simtho database and a selection ofthe Vatican Library’s Syriac manuscript collection as a case study, we propose a pipeline that aligns acorpus of e-texts with a set of digitised manuscript images, in order to ascertain the presence or absenceof texts between the e-text and manuscript corpora and thus contribute to their enrichment. We delveinto the complexities of this task, evaluating both effective tools for alignment and approaches to detectfactors that can contribute to alignment failures. This case study is intended as a first step towardsfoundational methodologies applicable to larger-scale manuscript processing efforts. For the dataset see https://zenodo.org/records/13941501