CDH@RUG presents: Digital Hands ON webinar series – Discussing the handling of historical texts through DH tools

Digital Hands ON is the new webinar series of the Groningen Centre for Digital Humanities, highlighting new tools and methods. Historical texts are crucial across Humanities fields, and a variety of digital methods both enhance and expand our possibilities for studying, exploring, editing, and manipulating them. This series brings together scholars and researchers from different domains to present innovative approaches, tools, methods, and research programmes that can help putting digital hands on historical records.

Join them at: meet.google.com/ttj-rgsu-jgv

The Digital Hands On series consists of four talks:

Thursday 10 March, 16:00 – 17:00
Antonia Karaisl and Nick White, Rescribe
Turn up the pipeline: making high quality OCR accessible

Optical Character Recognition (OCR), the technology that can render scanned pages of text editable and machine-readable, is a fairly ubiquitous technology in our day and age. Ever since the rise of neural networks in this field, even traditionally complex materials such as historic printed books or medieval manuscripts can be successfully handled. The lack of user-friendly solutions, however, continue to bar access to these sophisticated technologies for scholars with little technological know-how. This talk is presenting a simple app built to harness the powerful open source engine Tesseract in a maximally user-friendly way, packaging preprocessing, OCR and postprocessing in one single pipeline.

Thursday 14 April, 16:00 – 17:00
Arianna Betti, University of Amsterdam
Ground truths in data-driven history of ideas

Thursday 12 May, 16:00 – 17:00
Suzette van Haaren, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Handling the digital medieval manuscript

With the ever-growing prominence of digitization, medieval manuscripts are more often seen on a computer screen than in a library reading room. The material discrepancy between a medieval book made of parchment pages that are handwritten and elaborately decorated, and a digital object are evident. So, in what ways are we using the digital medieval manuscript? And how does handling the digital facsimile affect the way that we perceive and study our cultural heritage?

Thursday 9 June, 16:00 – 17:00
Mickey Engel, University of Hamburg
From the commentary to the source and back again: a digital structuring of the Paduan commentary tradition on Aristotle’s Physics

Find more information here: rug.nl/cdh or cdh@rug.nl