A Digital Approach to Filigranology: The Case Study of the DRACMarkS Project at the Austrian Academy of Sciences

Abstract

Watermarks have been used as certificates of quality and provenience of handmade paper since the 13th century. They are at the centre of a dedicated discipline, filigranology, which, along with bibliography and history, attempts to apply paper studies to the dating of chronologically unclear manuscripts and printed sources. The present dissertation will focus on the recent encounter between watermark research and digital humanities, creating new perspectives for the registering, archiving and analysis of paper for bibliographical purposes. It is at this intersection that the project on Digitisation, Recognition, and Automated Clustering of Watermarks in the Music Manuscripts of Franz Schubert (DRACMarkS) operates and progresses. By implementing the use of a thermographic camera for watermark reproduction and ensuring long-term data access with the use of XML files structured according to the standards of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), the project aims to compare resulting images using signal processing methods. After having precisely described each step of the digitisation process, the thesis will underline the strengths and weaknesses of the chosen techniques, focussing on their future developments. The possibility of identifying similar or identical watermarks contained in Franz Schubert's autographs will, in fact, support future research on the composer’s undated manuscripts and, more generally, on the European paper trade at the beginning of the 19th century.