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Archetype

About Archetype

Archetype is an open-source platform for studying manuscripts as evidence: searching a collection, examining images down to the stroke, annotating the hand, linking transcription to the page, and publishing the results in open formats. It is a modern rebuild of the long-running DigiPal framework — see From DigiPal to Archetype — re-architected so that any institution can run it over its own corpus.

The aim is simple: make the close reading of historical handwriting legible, searchable, and shareable, without locking that scholarship inside one tool or one website.

Principles

Section titled “Principles”

These are the commitments the project is built around.

  • Open source. The code is developed in the open, built to be inspected and self-hosted, with nothing essential hidden behind a hosted service. The team is currently choosing its open-source licence.
  • Standards at the core. Images use IIIF; text uses TEI; annotations can be exported as W3C Web Annotations. Work you create is portable and citable by design — no lock-in.
  • Deployment-agnostic. Archetype is software you run over your own manuscripts, on your own servers. One codebase serves many instances; the platform describes what the code can do, never a particular deployment.
  • The scholar is the author. Human judgement is the record. Editorial work carries an attributed, dated audit trail, and any future machine assistance is routed through review rather than writing to the record directly (see the Roadmap).
  • Continuity with the scholarship. The rebuild deliberately preserves the DigiPal method of modelling script — see Palaeography on Archetype — while modernising the architecture around it.

Find your way in

Section titled “Find your way in”
  • For researchers — use Archetype in your research: try the live corpus, bring your own manuscripts, and cite and reuse what you find.
  • For contributors — run Archetype, host an instance, and help develop it.
  • For funders — what already works, who it serves, and where funding would make the difference.
  • From DigiPal to Archetype — the project’s origins and what carried over.
  • Community & help — how to reach the project and take part.