Maritime Southeast Asia possesses a culturally rich history. From early interactions with mainland Southeast Asia and China, to later commerce with European nations, it is home to many thousands of important manuscripts, mostly dating from the 17th to early 20th centuries, which include languages, materials and art styles from a variety of different cultures – many of which are beautifully illustrated or ornamented.
The main aims of my project are to perform a multimodal non-invasive analysis of the collection of maritime South East Asian illuminated manuscripts at the British Library and to develop AI / Machine Learning algorithms to automatically process and analyse large amounts of data. After which, results can be used to determine, or provide evidence of, the materials used in the production of Maritime Southeast Asian manuscripts.