This is a response to the recently published "A Research Agenda for Historical and Multilingual Optical Character Recognition" by David A. Smith and Ryan Cordell, with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The report analyzes current challenges faced by humanities researchers using OCR text and outlines important avenues for research to improve OCR quality. In many … [Read more...] about Improving OCR using FromThePage
digital humanities
DH Project Ideas from the Texas AI Summit
Friday I attended the Texas AI Summit, a one day AI-focused conference conveniently in my hometown. The fun of a conference like this is looking for techniques and tools that could be applied to Digital Humanities projects; the pain is sitting through so many eye bleeding talks with mathematical formulas for classifying data. Here are the two best ideas. You're welcome. 1) Use … [Read more...] about DH Project Ideas from the Texas AI Summit
DH Projects -- Slavery Images
Brumfield Labs and Henry Lovejoy are pleased to announce the launch of the new version of SlaveryImages.org. The site contains over 1200 images documenting the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World. The images it contains are used by teachers, researchers, students, … [Read more...] about DH Projects -- Slavery Images
DH Projects -- The Curran Index
In addition to FromThePage, Brumfield Labs also provides software development to scholars, historical societies, and heritage organizations. The following is a description of a project we did for Gary Simons and the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals to produce an interactive version of the Curran Index. Gary Simons, the current editor of the Curran Index, had … [Read more...] about DH Projects -- The Curran Index
Building a Structured Transcription Tool with FreeUKGen
I'm currently working with FreeUKGen--the charity behind the genealogy database FreeBMD--to build a general-purpose, open-source tool for crowdsourced transcription of structured manuscript data into a searchable database. We're basing our system on the Scribe tool developed for the Citizen Science Alliance for What's the Score at the Bodleian, which originated out of their … [Read more...] about Building a Structured Transcription Tool with FreeUKGen