+ Transkribus goes America

In May, Barbara Denicolò from the Transkribus-Team Innsbruck and Elena Mühlbauer from the Diözesanarchiv in Passau in the name of READ travelled to the Midwest of the USA to present Transkribus to the American audience.

Though small, Kalamazoo in the state of Michigan, is well-known for one of the major congresses of the various mediaeval disciplines, which takes place every year at the Western Michigan University WMU. At the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Elena and Barbara presented Transkribus as a practical tool for philologists and historians to transcribe and annotate old manuscripts and prints manually or automatically.

After a brief general introduction, the participants were able to segment and transcribe various documents themselves in a test collection created especially for them in a total of 90 minutes, and to apply particularly good models themselves. Although the workshop was unfortunately scheduled for the last time slot on Sunday and there were already noticeably less congress participants walking across the large university campus, a good dozen interested people found their way to the workshop.

The great interest was noticeable, while participants talked about their own projects and discussed possible applications and use cases. Hanna Lloyd from the University of Toronto for example reported on her user experiences and research results in her lecture “Digitizing Paleography: Transcribing Latin Charters with Transkribus”.

More information about the conference can be found here:

https://wmich.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/u434/2019/medieval-congress-program-2019.pdf

https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress