+ Data First!? READ participates in Digital Humanities Austria Conference

The Alpine city of Innsbruck is at the heart of the READ project – the READ project coordinator, Günter Mühlberger, and his team of Transkribus developers work at the University of Innsbruck.  Last week, the University hosted Digital Humanities Austria 2017, a major conference which invited presenters to think about the quality and quantity of data in the field under the theme ‘Data first!?’.

READ project partners were part of the Programme and Organising Committees for the conference and also presented their work to conference attendees.

Participants learnt how to use the Transkribus platform in a workshop and were among the first to experiment with the newly available Keyword Spotting tool that allows users to search in the full-text of handwritten documents.  The ScanTent device, designed to assist users who wish to digitise documents with their mobile phone, was also demonstrated during the Tools gallery.

Finally, a presentation from researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Claudia Resch, Daniel Schopper and Dario Kampkaspar) explained how they have been collaborating with the Transkribus team to apply Automated Text Recognition technology to a digitised collection of eighteenth-century Austrian newspapers.  Anyone interested in finding out more can consult slides from a similar presentation given by Dario Kampkaspar at the recent Transkribus User Conference in Vienna.

Thanks to all the participants and presenters for a fruitful conference!