HIMANIS-Scribes. Writer identification in French Royal Chancery Registers JJ37-JJ50 (1303-1315) - Annotated Images and Computational Palaeographic Analysis. Dataset and code

This dataset contains 3,300+ digitized images, scribe annotations, and computational analyses of French royal chancery registers (Paris, Archives nationales, JJ37-JJ50) produced between 1303-1315 under King Philip IV and his successors. The registers are written in Cursiva script by over 100 different scribes. The dataset includes:- High-resolution JPEG images of all pages- Scribe attributions based on paleographic analysis by Jean Guerout (1958), corrected and enhanced through computational analysis- 400-dimensional image feature vectors extracted using state-of-the-art writer identification algorithms (Christlein et al., ICDAR 2017)- t-SNE visualizations (interactive HTML and static PNG) showing handwriting similarities- Complete metadata with folio numbers, act numbers, and diplomatic information- Source code (Jupyter notebook) for reproducing all analyses This corpus demonstrates that computer vision methods can successfully distinguish scribal hands in homogeneous medieval manuscript production environments, validating and enhancing traditional paleographic expertise. The automatic analysis confirmed 109 distinct hands, corrected ambiguous attributions, and identified scribe changes not detected in previous manual analysis. The dataset accompanies the article: Stutzmann, D. (forthcoming 2026). "Les livres de chartes et leur écriture : registres et cartulaires dans l'espace français aux XIIIe-XVe siècles". In H. Pátková & M. Hradilová (eds.), Encounters in written culture: influence, interchange, transfer, reception? Proceedings of the 22nd Colloquium of the Comité international de paléographie latine (Prague, 14-16 September 2022). Turnhout: Brepols (Bibliologia). Related projects:- HIMANIS: Full-text indexing of chancery registers (http://himanis.huma-num.fr/app/)- HOME: Medieval European history database (https://heurist.huma-num.fr/stutzmann_himanis)