Tracing the origins of incunabula through the automatic identification of fonts in digitised documents

Abstract

AbstractIncunabulaare the texts printed mainly during the second half of 15th century that are a key cultural element in a revolutionary period of the history and evolution of the book and the printing. In these books, the identification of their origin largely affects its academic, cultural, patrimonial, and economical value. This paper proposes a process to automate the identification of the origin of a digitised incunable document using the Proctor/Haebler method, a commonly established procedure in the field. This process has been validated with a selected dataset obtained from the incunabula collection at the digital repository of the University of Zaragoza.