Presentation
Download the complete guidelines (PDF)
CATMuS, common rules for the transcription of documents from the middle ages to today
This website presents the standards collectively established by the CATMuS community (standing for Consistent Approaches to Transcribing ManuScripts). It lists a series of recommendations concerning the transcription of medieval and modern documents. It does not cover practices for earlier phases (such as the segmentation into zones or lines1) or later phases (like text normalization, development of abbreviations2, etc).
Site structure
This website is divided into two main sections:
1. Guidelines for CATMuS Transcription Practices
This section documents the standardized methods for transcription.
- Generalities
- Transcription of letters and numbers
- Accents and cedillas
- Abbreviations
- Word segmentation
- Punctuation
- Functional signs
2. Useful Resources
This section includes: (1) a character table describing the main characters used in CATMuS-compliant transcriptions and (2) links to tools and datasets related to the CATMuS ecosystem.
Cite CATMuS
Ariane Pinche, Thibault Clérice, Alix Chagué, Jean-Baptiste Camps, Malamatenia Vlachou- Efstathiou, et al., CATMuS-Medieval: Consistent Approaches to Transcribing ManuScripts: A generalized set of guidelines and models for Latin scripts from Middle Ages (8th–16th century). 2023. hal-04346939
Notes
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See SegmOnto's recommendations in Gabay, S., Camps, J.-B., Pinche, A., & Jahan, C. (2021). Segmonto: common vocabulary and practices for analysing the layout of manuscripts (and more). In 16th international conference on document analysis and recognition (ICDAR 2021), et https://segmonto.github.io/.↩
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See the abbreviation management section.↩