[HN Gopher] Automated reading of medieval manuscripts: Alternati... ___________________________________________________________________ Automated reading of medieval manuscripts: Alternative for palaeography classes? Author : danso Score : 24 points Date : 2022-08-16 15:02 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl) (TXT) w3m dump (www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl) | tarl0s wrote: | The Roma Tre University has a research project named In Codice | Ratio. One of its objectives is to transcribe through AI and OCR | the whole Vatican Secret Archives - one of the biggest collection | of manuscripts, some of them more than a thousand years old. | | The code hasn't been released (yet) but you can find some | preliminary results here: | http://www.inf.uniroma3.it/db/icr/preliminary-results.html | jofer wrote: | I kept reading that as "paleogeography", which is a common | geological term. (i.e. reconstructing ancient landscapes) | | Weird how the brain jumps to "term I know" rather than actually | reading a word. | azangru wrote: | Curious about the scope of the Digital Editing course mentioned | in the article, but the course page is in Dutch :-( | avyeed_desa wrote: | I like Transkribus a lot and it is extremely helpful to get quick | transcriptions, especially when the models are trained well. It | will never get to 100%, but manual intervention is always needed. | And Transkribus is a really, realls well-thought out piece of | software, even though its heavy dependencies on Java make it | slow, especially on 50+ page documents. | | However, i never liked their move from a research project to a | commercial model. Their signup has plenty of credits for an | individual who just wants to edit their family documents, but i | still think it should be a bit more lenient for personal use. | | Thankfully there is eScriptorium. Even if it is still in early | development it is a more user-friendly alternative to | Transkribus. https://gitlab.com/scripta/escriptorium | wjnc wrote: | I came to comment on a few things: | | 1. Indeed, a publicly funded European research project turned | commercial software (closed source?) that expects institutions | to pay for annual fees. Hmm. I understand OSS still needs | constributors and has ongoing maintenance costs, but couldn't | there be a more efficient way? It had a very German academic | feel to me (nofi, and indeed it's an endeavor started at 4 | German universities.) | | 2. The blogpost almost reads like a nineties description of the | value of IT. (Fun read and perspective though! This is the | positivist approach to history that underpins many interpretive | histories of the future. Great and underestimated work.) The | whole point of computer and user augmenting each other | continuously somewhat falls short with the author saying how | impressive, but fallible students and computers are. Along the | lines of "okay, the output is x 1000 and of pretty good | quality, but it's not professional academic quality". When I | think of chess, or poker: computers have given people /new ways | of studying/ even before applying. I think that point is still | missed here. The software should point out mistakes by the | students in training, while it learns by the additional input. | That is the virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. | | And 3. Things like the scientific R and Python ecosystems, or | like Stan have shown me the power of creating open source tools | for other use. Like Andrew Gelman, who has remarked multiple | times that he never could have expected the use cases Stan has | now. (There are Bayesian sport scientist now..!) Teach people | and give them tools, but don't dictate the entire workflow. | Please let outsiders have a chance of swapping models, doing | proof of concepts etc. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-17 23:01 UTC)