Transforming scholarship in the archives through handwritten text recognition:Transkribus as a case study

Purpose: An overview of the current use of handwritten text recognition (HTR) on archival manuscript material, as provided by the EU H2020 funded Transkribus platform. It explains HTR, demonstrates Transkribus, gives examples of use cases, highlights the affect HTR may have on scholarship, and evidences this turning point of the advanced use of digitised heritage content. The paper aims to discuss these issues. - Design/methodology/approach: This paper adopts a case study approach, using the development and delivery of the one openly available HTR platform for manuscript material. - Findings: Transkribus has demonstrated that HTR is now a useable technology that can be employed in conjunction with mass digitisation to generate accurate transcripts of archival material. Use cases are demonstrated, and a cooperative model is suggested as a way to ensure sustainability and scaling of the platform. However, funding and resourcing issues are identified. - Research limitations/implications: The paper presents results from projects: further user studies could be undertaken involving interviews, surveys, etc. - Practical implications: Only HTR provided via Transkribus is covered: however, this is the only publicly available platform for HTR on individual collections of historical documents at time of writing and it represents the current state-of-the-art in this field. - Social implications: The increased access to information contained within historical texts has the potential to be transformational for both institutions and individuals. - Originality/value: This is the first published overview of how HTR is used by a wide archival studies community, reporting and showcasing current application of handwriting technology in the cultural heritage sector

Overview of the ICDAR 2013 Competition on Book Structure Extraction

Abstract—This paper summarizes the 3rd Book Structure Extraction competition that was run at the ICDAR 2013. Its goal is to evaluate and compare automatic techniques for deriving structure information from digitized books, which could then be used to aid navigation inside the books. More specifically, the task that participants are faced with is to construct hyperlinked tables of contents for a collection of 1,000 digitized books. This paper reviews the setup of the competition, the book collection used in the task, and the measures used for the evaluation. The main novelty of the 2013 competition is that we were able to rely on an external provider for the ground truthing phase, hence granting the consistency of the evaluation. In addition, this allowed us to nearly double the number of annotated books from the 1,040 books annotated in 2009 and 2011 to over 2,000 books. The paper further presents the resulting performance of the 6 participating research teams, and briefly summarizes their approaches. I