Malamatenia (Matenia) Vlachou Efstathiou

About my long and complicated name : You can call me Maténia (pronounced like the Italian painter Mantegna — but without the first “n”). I secretly enjoy the occasional creative misspellings from the brave souls who won’t copy-paste.

I’m a third-year PhD student in Digital Palaeography at IRHT-CNRS and IMAGINE (ENPC) labs. My research is focused on Medieval Latin Script Characterisation and Analysis (project CrEMe). I’m supervised by Dominique Stutzmann and Mathieu Aubry.

Before my PhD, I completed a Digital Humanities Master's degree at École nationale des chartes-PSL (2021-2023) and a Master's degree in Classics from Sorbonne Université(2020-2021) with a specialization in Late Antiquity Latin Grammarians.

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News

July 2025 Co-organizing a workshop on transcription guidelines for HTR for Ancient Greek at DH2025 , Lisbon.

May, 2025 Invited to give a workshop called "The Learnable Handwriter: An Interpretable Deep Learning Approach for Palaeographical Description and Analysis" at the Center of Digital Humanities of Antwerp University.

Feb, 2025 Recipient of the Maison Française d'Oxford monthly scholarship for February 2025.

Feb, 2024 Accepted to present at CIPL 2025 in Vienna, with a presentation on "Rapprocher analyse paléographique et computationnelle pour la description de mains".

Jun, 2024 Accepted to IWCP 2024 for our work An Interpretable Deep Learning Approach for Morphological Script Type Analysis.

Apr, 2024 Accepted to ICDAR 2024 for our work CATMuS Medieval.

Mar, 2024 Organized the second edition of the Biblissima+ Cluster 3 Biblissima+ Cluster 3 “Artificial Intelligence for pattern and handwriting recognition" conference.

Jun, 2023 Organized the Young Researcher Days in memoriam Louis Holtz at the École nationale des chartes.

Research

I am interested in palaeographical description and analysis, particularly for Late Medieval script types and hands, as well as data production for HTR models and transcription norms.

Interpretable Deep Learning for Palaeographic Variability Analysis; revisiting the scribal hands of Charles V’ Grandes Chroniques de France (Paris, BnF, fr., 2813)

CATMuS Medieval: A multilingual large-scale cross-century dataset in Latin script for handwritten text recognition and beyond

An Interpretable Deep Learning Approach for Morphological Script Type Comparison

CREMMA Medii Aevi: Literary Manuscript Text Recognition in Latin

Master Thesis Projects

Aside from my PhD project, glossed grammatical manuscripts as well as grammatical theory in Late Antiquity remain at the center of my academic interests.

Éditer les manuscrits grammaticaux glosés : solutions numériques face aux défis paléographiques; Le cas de la tradition manuscrite glosée d’Eutychès grammaticus

Master’s thesis (M2) in Digital Humanities at the École nationale des chartes (dir. Franck Cinato and Peter Stokes). Grade: 17/20.

illa circa Latinitatem : Questions de normativité dans le Chapitre 1,15 de l’ Ars Grammatica de Charisius

Master’s thesis (M2) in Classics (spec. Latin) at Sorbonne University (dir. Alessandro Garcea). Grade: 18.5/20.

Presentations

• October 2024 – Lecture distante de la fonction des annotations du de uerbo d’eutychès grammaticus : entre ’glose anarchique’ et commentaire continu. Invitation and presentation at the conference "Innover pour conserver. Le texte entre forme canonique et fluidité dans la tradition manuscrite médiévale".
• May 2024 The CATMuS Initiative: Building Large and Diverse Corpora for Handwritten Text Recognition. Presentation at the DHAI seminar (with Thibault Clérice), Observatoire de Paris.
• May 2024 – Rapprocher analyse paléographique et computationnelle pour l’analyse de l’écriture manuscrite. Presentation at the Ier Colloque doctoral d’histoire du livre et de codicologie arabe "Approches plurielles des manuscrits arabes".
• November 2023 – Un pipeline pour éditer les manuscrits grammaticaux glosés: de l’acquisition à l’analyse. Presentation at the seminar Les p’tits déj’ «Humanités numériques» , IRHT.

Workshops

• May 2025 – Workshop "The Learnable Handwriter: An Interpretable Deep Learning Approach for Palaeographical Description and Analysis." Two-day workshop in Antwerp Digital Humanities Center (invit. Mike Kestemont), Belgium.
• October 2024 – Reconnaissance automatique d’écriture (HTR) et intelligence artificielle pour lire les écritures latines. IStage d'initiation au manuscrit médiéval, IRHT, Paris.
• September 2023 – HTR – Transcribing Archives and Manuscripts with eScriptorium. Workshop at the BnF Datalab (with Thibault Clérice), Bnf, Paris.

Conference Organisation

• July 2025 – Transcription Guidelines for Greek HTR: Harmonizing Guidelines for Handwritten Text Recognition of Ancient Greek. Organized with Mathilde Verstraete, Maxime Guénette, Marianne Reboul, Marcello Vitali-Rosati. DH2025 @Lisbon.
• March 2024 – Biblissim-IA 2024: Intelligence artificielle et la reconnaissance de formes et d'écritures manuscrites. Annual days of Cluster 3 of the EquipEx Biblissima+. Organized with Dominique Stutzmann, Daniel Stoekl, Peter Stokes. IRHT.
• June 2023 – La grammatica et les différentes facettes de la transmission du savoir. Journées d'étude de jeunes chercheurs Chroniques Chartistes in memoriam Louis Holtz (1929–2023). Proceedings to be published in the Studia Artistarum series. École nationale des chartes – PSL.

Last updated: July 2025

Design and source code from Jon Barron's website with tweaks from Mathieu Aubry