Lecture
SAILS Lunch Time Seminar: Bram Caers
- Date
- Monday 18 November 2024
- Time
- Location
- Online only
AI unlocks written heritage: (teaching) handwritten text recognition
Everyone knows Google Books, and how this way of searching through machine-readable text from millions of books has revolutionised access to information, both for scholars and the public alike. The technology that Google Books uses performs well on printed matter, but not so much on handwritten sources. To tackle that problem, computer scientists have been developing ‘handwritten text recognition’ (HTR), an AI-based technology that is quickly learning to read any type of handwritten source, regardless of language or age. The technology has tremendous potential to unlock handwritten literary and historical sources from our past, and is now increasingly being adopted by archives, libraries, and researchers.
In this talk I will discuss the potential of the technology from a teaching perspective. Humanities students associate AI primarily with alpha sciences, but are often enthusiastic to find out that AI is being employed in historical research too. I will report from a course on ‘digital text editions’, in which we acquaint students with HTR against the general background of processing historical text material into digitally available text editions.
The lesson to be drawn from four years of teaching HTR is especially that the technology is increasingly effective, up to a point where it raises questions on which skills humanities students still need to master in the future.
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