Summerschool: »A digital Workflow for Historical Corpora - from HTR to NER« 

When?        26.08.-28.08.
Where?      Online via Zoom
Who?           Students, but also historians of any qualification level, from BA to professorship, archivists, and all other interested parties.

Content

Scholars working in the field of history must actively face up to the diverse possibilities and methods arising from the rapid developments in the field of digitalisation and artificial intelligence. Digital humanities and digital history are currently changing historical work in many ways and opening up new ways of working with and accessing sources. Particularly in the field of manuscript recognition and the processing of large amounts of data, comprehensive progress can be recorded. Against this backdrop, the FGHO, in collaboration with the Universities of Bern and Bielefeld, is offering a practice-oriented summer school, which is being organised this year in the context of the joint research project ‘The Flow - from Deep-Learning to Digital Analysis and their Role in the Humanities. Creating, Evaluating and Critiquing Workflows for Historical Corpora’.

In particular, working with original sources and the associated competences are subject to change. In the field of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), new tools are constantly being developed to support the transcription of handwritten sources. It is not always easy for researchers to maintain an overview of the numerous algorithms and applications with all their advantages and disadvantages. This is why the first block of the event is dedicated to comparing different providers. After an introduction, the focus will be on working with the freely accessible tool eScriptorium. Participants will have the opportunity to try out the necessary HTR work steps - from uploading the files to segmenting and recognising the text - using prepared practice material.

The second thematic block deals with Named Entity Recognition and Nested Entity Recognition: Which questions can be answered with the help of NER? What advantages does NER offer for historical research? After an introduction to the topic, various tools will be presented and participants will then have the opportunity to practise NER tagging with the annotation tool INCEpTION.

Registration

Students and historians of all levels, from BA to professor, archive staff and other interested parties are invited. Applicants should already have some experience in the field of HTR. The conference will be held in English. Participants will need internet access and a Google account. An application for participation requires a short CV (max. 1 A4) and a letter of motivation of no more than one page, which should also comment on existing previous knowledge and personal expectations or own current projects. If interested, please submit the above information in a PDF to info@fgho.eu. The registration deadline is 10 August 2024.

Programme

Monday, 26nd August 
 9:30-12:00: Introduction

12:00-13:30: Lunch Break

13:30-15:30: Introduction to HTR/NER

15:30-16:00: Coffee Break

16:00-16:30/17:00: Input

Tuesday, 27th August
  9:30-12:00: Introduction to various HTR providers

12:00-13:30: Lunch Break

13:30-15:30: Introduction to eScriptorium

15:30-16:00: Coffee Break

16:00-17:00: Time for questions

17:00: Virtual aperitif

Wednesday, 28th August

9:30-12:00: Introduction to NER

12:00-13:30: Lunch Break

13:30-15:30: Intoduction to INCEpTION

15:30-16:00: Coffee Break

16:00-17:00: Closure with open questions and discussion