Presentation at ISAW, New York

Our platform for automatic manuscript transcription will be presented in the talk “eScripta: An Open Source Platform for Artificial Intelligence and Deep Annotation Applied to Written Objects” by Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York on Thursday, April 4, 2019 between 12h30-1h30.

Address: 15 East 84th Street, New York, NY 10025.

Abstract

In the frame of the research programme Scripta at Université PSL in Paris, we are developing eScripta, an open source virtual research environment for analyzing and publishing manuscripts and inscriptions. It combines combining quantitative approaches from AI such as automatic layout analysis and automatic transcription of manuscripts (HTR / OCR) or automatic textual criticism and stemmatology with qualitative approaches, deep paleographical, philological, linguistic or historical annotation, in bricks such as kraken by Benjamin Kiessling, Archetype by Peter Stokes or pyrrha by the ENC. We will present the current state of the platform as well as preliminary research results from projects linked to it dealing with automatic transcription of Medieval Hebrew manuscripts (sofer mahir with U Maryland, Dicta and the National Library of Israel) and crowdsourcing their corrections (tikkoun-sofrim – with Haifa U and the National Library of Israel) where we have reached character error ratios of up to 2% for Latin and Hebrew Medieval manuscripts.