Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Collaborating On Machine Reading: Training Algorithms To Read Complex Collections, Carrie M. Pirmann, Brian R. King, Bhagawat Acharya, Katherine M. Faull

Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference

Interdisciplinary collaboration between two faculty members in the humanities and computer science, a research librarian, and an undergraduate student has led to remarkable results in an ongoing international DH research project that has at its core 18th century manuscripts. The corpus stems from a vast collection of archival materials held by the Moravian Church in the UK, Germany, and the US. The number of pages to be transcribed, differences in handwriting styles, paper quality, and original language pose enormous problems for the feasibility of human transcription. This presentation will review the hypothesis, process, and findings of a summer research project …