June 8, 2025 Software Open Access

ScriptSight

Hussein Mohammed

ScriptSight is a software tool that can be used to explore and sort collections of document-page images using their AI-generated ‘computational visual catalogues’. You can find a test sample of such catalogue here. Multiple visual attributes, such as text orientation, used writing implements (pencil versus ink), and text colour, can be filtered concurrently to isolate pages matching the specified criteria. Matching pages can be previewed as thumbnails with optional overlays indicating detected text regions, and and saved as organised, date-stamped folders for review or further processing.

Watch the accompanying video for an illustration of the basic functions.

The research for this work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy - EXC 2176 ‘Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures’, project no. 390893796. The research was conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg.

I thank Dr. Quang-Vinh Dang for his significant contributions to developing the AI models used to generate the "computational visual catalogues". In addition, I thank Hui Xu for testing this tool and providing a useful feedback.