Christine Roughan

Christine Roughan is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Digital Humanities and Manuscript, Rare Book and Archive Studies.

Christine earned her Ph.D. in the Ancient World from New York University in January 2023, where her doctoral work explored a premodern astronomical curriculum and its continued use in Greek and Arabic between the second and thirteenth centuries CE (with some influences also on scholarly activities in Syriac, Latin, Hebrew, and Persian). Christine's research applies computational approaches to the study of manuscript transmissions in the Mediterranean world, particularly of mathematical and scientific works.

During her postdoctoral term at Princeton, Christine is training document segmentation and automated text recognition models to handle the complex layouts of scientific works in digitized manuscripts, paying particular attention to paratextual material. She is involved in building institutional infrastructure to support research with handwritten text recognition (HTR) through the Princeton Open HTR Initiative and the HTR2HPC project. Christine is also a co-organizer of the Source Codes of the Past workshop (launching an international HTR network for manuscript analysis) and serves as a group organizer and instructor for the Vienna HTR Winter School (2024, 2025) hosted by the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Her other research and teaching in the digital humanities includes relational and graph database design, data visualization, natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning. For more on her work, visit cmroughan.github.io/.