Reading and relating: Digitally tracing human groupings in the illustrations of the Utrecht Psalter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within the illustrations of the ninth century Utrecht Psalter, groupings of multiple people with no imperative role in the narrative are found in large numbers. This inclusion is unique and with clear intention, and unlike other non-essential pictorial elements in the composition such as foliage or buildings, all of these figures are drawn to completion. As the images in the Utrecht Psalter show consistency in their measurements on the page, as well as through the scale of elements within the actual illustrations, direct comparisons can be made on how these figures are employed in the scene. By using digital applications to create a compositional overlay of all these groups, a concentration of figures on the left and right sides of the image is observed. This article suggests that such an arrangement provides a readable image, with human groups added in order to encourage engagement with the text of the Psalter and aid in remembering its messages. 
 
 Keywords: Utrecht Psalter; medieval literacy; manuscript illustration; image composition; digital humanities; artwork engagement
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".