Using eScriptorium to work on documents. eScriprorium applied to a 13th century French cartulary

As part of the research on Digital Diplomatics or on new tools usable in Diplomatics’ studies, this essay discusses an experience of treating a 13th century French cartulary with eScriptorium. By analyzing the functioning of this open-source software, created mainly for the automatic transcription of any type of document, in any language, on any medium, we will see step by step its application on the the Saint-Etienne-des-Grès church’s cartulary. If the starting hypothesis proposed the software’s use for the analysis of both internal and external features on the one hand and on the other the experimentation of several writing models on a document which by nature can include a great variety of writings, as in this case, the work proved satisfactory for the analysis of the external features of the document and a good result was achieved in terms of automatic transcription. As far as the analysis of the internal features is concerned, it is currently not possible to carry it out directly on the software: by the way, the work can be exported and then transformed into TEI; the team is however working on the integration in eScriptorium of the Archetype’s and the TEI’s principles, promising excellent results in the near future.