READ revolutionizes access to handwritten documents
From the Middle Ages to today, from old Greek to modern English, from running text to tables or forms
About
READ's mission is to revolutionize access to archival documents with the support of cutting-edge technology such as Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Keyword Spotting (KWS).
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READ addresses archives and libraries, humanities scholars, family historians, volunteers - and computer scientists
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Research in READ comprises exciting fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.
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READ technology is available via the service platform Transkribus. Upload documents, train a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model, process text and follow the progress of the project.
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+ Presentations from the READ partners now available!
The READ project was launched in January 2016 at the ‘Technology meets Scholarship’ conference at the Hessian State Archives in Marburg (Germany). This conference was organised by the co:op (community as opportunity – the creative archives’ and users’ network) project.
Slides and presentations from the READ partners are now available at the co:op website (see links below). Videos of the presentations are also coming soon!
These presentations give a great introduction to the READ partners and the objectives of our project.
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Francesco Roberg (Hessian State Archives): Short Introduction to co:op and READ
Roger Labahn (University of Rostock): Handwritten Text Recognition. Key Concepts
Enrique Vidal (Polytechnic University of Valencia): Keyword Searching as a Trade-Off Between Recall and Precision. A New Way to Search Large Collections of Digitised Documents
Basilis Gatos (National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos”): Hard Tasks in the Background. Layout Analysis
Stefan Fiel (Technical University of Vienna): Automated Writer Identification and its Use Cases for Archival Documents
Louise Seaward (University College London): The Crowd, the Volunteers and the Supertranscribers. Building and Supporting an Online User Community for the Bentham Edition
Christian Sieber (State Archives of Zurich): Transcription – Swiss Made. The Projects of the State Archives of Zurich
István Kecskeméti (National Archives Finland): In-House Digitisation as a Core Task. The Finnish National Archives
Sebastian Colutto (University of Innsbruck): Transkribus. A Virtual Research Environment for the Transcription and Recognition of Historical Documents
Günter Mühlberger (University of Innsbruck): The READ project. Objectives, Tasks and Partner Organisations
+ Conference at Archives Nationales
University College London presented at a conference at the Archives Nationales in Paris on 16 March 2016.
Researchers from France, the UK and Ireland came together to share ideas on using crowdsourcing for collaborative transcription and digital scholarly editing. Louise Seaward gave an introduction to the READ project and explained how handwritten text recognition is being used by volunteers working on UCL’s Transcribe Bentham initiative.