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via Transkribus is covered: however, this is the only publicly available platform for HTR on individual collections of historical documents at time of writing and it represents the current state-of-the-art in this field.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

Stratospheric and upper tropospheric measurements of long-lived tracers and photochemically active species of the nitrogen, chlorine, and bromine families with GLORIA-B

International audienceThe Gimballed Limb Observer for Radiance Imaging of the Atmosphere (GLORIA) is a limb-imaging Fourier-Transform spectrometer (iFTS) providing mid-infrared spectra with high spectral sampling (0.0625 cm-1 in the wavelength range 780-1400 cm-1). GLORIA, a demonstrator for the Changing-Atmosphere Infra-Red Tomography Explorer (CAIRT, one of the remaining two candidates for the ESA Earth Explorer 11 mission) was deployed on the Russian M55 Geophysica and is still being deployed on HALO, the German high-altitude research aircraft. In order to enhance the vertical range of GLORIA to observations in the middle stratosphere albeit still reaching down to the middle troposphere, the instrument was adapted to measurements from stratospheric balloon platforms. GLORIA-B performed its first flight from Kiruna (northern Sweden) in August 2021 and its second flight from Timmins (Ontario/Canada) in August 2022 in the framework of the EU Research Infrastructure HEMERA.The objectives of GLORIA-B observations for these campaigns have been its technical qualification and the provision of a first imaging hyperspectral limb-emission dataset from 5 to 36 km altitude. Further, scientific objectives, which are, amongst many others, the diurnal evolution of photochemically active species belonging to the nitrogen (e.g. N2O5, NO2), chlorine (e.g. ClONO2), and bromine (BrONO2) families are discussed.In this contribution we demonstrate the performance of GLORIA-B with regard to level-2 data of the flight in August 2021, consisting of retrieved altitude profiles of a variety of trace gases. We will show examples of selected results together with uncertainty estimations, altitude resolution as well as long-lived tracer comparisons to accompanying in-situ datasets. In addition, diurnal variations of photochemically active gases are compared to simulations of the chemistry climate model EMAC. Calculations largely reproduce the temporal variations of the species observed by GLORIA-B