+ Transkribus User Conference 2020 – we keep transcribing as READ-COOP

On 6-7 February 2020 the third Transkribus User Conference took place at the Faculty of Catholic Theology in Innsbruck. 160 Transkribus users made their way to the snowy town of Innsbruck, which had been the conference’s venue for the first time.

Thanks to the great input of our invited speakers we managed to offer a versatile program and had the pleasure to get an insight into different Transkribus-related topics. The main items we had on our agenda were case studies, demonstrations of new tools and technological insights. All that with a “hands-on”-focus this year. To integrate the participants as much as possible we offered a total of ten workshops, covering topics like TextToImage, Structure Training, Tables and Cadastre maps.

In the “Transkribus in practice”-sessions experienced Transkribus users shared their knowledge about recognition projects, dealing with a variety of languages like Dutch, Italian and Ottoman Turkish. In the public model session engaged users were presenting their models, which recently became available for all Transkribus users. Models for Latin, Church Slavonic and Dutch had been amongst them.

We also heard about visualizing data from parish registers and about how the crowd-sourcing platform VeleHanden makes use of Transkribus, allowing volunteers to produce transcriptions that can then be automatically used as training data for recognising notarial documents.

As the READ-project, which was financed by the EU Horizon 2020 research and infrastructure program, has come to an end in summer 2019, we had a look into the future, where Transkribus will be further developed with the READ-COOP as legal entity. We are especially happy having been able to also welcome a good number of the COOP-members at the conference.

Currently our camera team is working on cutting the film material and as soon as possible we will make the presentation videos available to you. Transkribus users will be informed via email as soon as they will be publicised on Youtube.

The conference was accompanied by a couple of social events, which provided the opportunity to get in touch with other TUC-participants and exchange in a more casual setting, which was a great pleasure and lots of fun. We met at the pre-conference get-together at the Galway Pub on Wednesday evening to have some beer and wine in preparation for the conference.

After the conference day on Thursday we moved to the Bierstindl-restaurant for dinner. At the Tombola three people had been lucky and embraced their own ScanTent. Then it was time for our DJ to get started with an interesting song wish list (we had “Anton aus Tirol” of DJ Ötzi), which didn’t stop people from hitting the dance floor until the restaurant staff stopped them due to the curfew.

On Saturday we went sledging and skiing with the outdoor enthusiastic part of the TUC-participants, in order to enjoy the fresh snow. The weather was great, food at the mountain hut delicious and luckily we could send everybody home without serious injuries ?

We would like to thank all participants of the Transkribus User Conference again for making the event a great one. It was a place of informative presentations, inspiring talks and discussions and last but not least a lot of fun.