Digital Palimpsests and the Collapse of Textual Authority: Lessons from the 2021 Beirut Manuscript Project

Abstract

After the 2020 port explosion destroyed 30 % of the city’s archival heritage, a crowdsourced digitization effort inadvertently introduced 1,400 transcription errors per 10,000 characters. Forensic philology shows that OCR confidence thresholds were misaligned with Syriac script complexity. The study advances a threshold hermeneutics to balance open access with scholarly authority.