+ Document Engineering, Cultural Heritage, and Digital Humanities – READ at the DocEng2016 symposium

This year’s DocEng symposium was organised by one of the READ partners, the Computer Vision Lab at Vienna University of Technology.  Between 13 and 16 September academic and industrial researchers were welcomed to Vienna where they had the opportunity to hear about the latest research on document engineering and participate in workshops on topics such as Table Modelling and Future Publishing Formats.

One of the keynote lectures was delivered by Dr Günter Mühlberger, the projector coordinator of READ.  Dr Mühlberger’s talk was entitled, ‘Research Infrastructures, or how Document Engineering, Cultural Heritage, and Digital Humanities can go together’.  Dr Mühlberger wrote his PhD thesis on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and has always been interested in integrating digital technologies into the humanities.  His paper described the Transkribus research infrastructure which is being developed by the READ project.  The talk showed an audience of specialised computer scientists that the technologies of Handwritten Text Recognition, Automatic Writer Identification and Keyword Spotting are hugely relevant to the humanities sector because they can improve access to historical records.