← The bench

02 · The label

Collector attribution

Whose hand wrote this unsigned label?

Status
Specified, unbuilt
Field
Empty — nobody is doing this
Who wants it
History of science, provenance research.

Why it matters

Many old sheets carry no collector name. Handwriting style matched against known exemplars can restore the attribution, and rolls up into a network graph of who collected with whom.

What it needs

Exemplar sets per collector, which the catalogue can bootstrap from signed sheets.

State of the art

Rare. Adjacent work exists in manuscript studies.

Next head

Phenology in free text