Transcribathon

Description

Transcribathon
with Archives Portal Europe and Transkribus
 
30 November 2018
Kings College London
Franklin-Wilkins Building (Waterloo)
Room 1.20
This one-day workshop aims to teach students about how to conduct historical research using online archives, and how to encode historical documents in order to turn digitised collections into machine-readable encoded text.
The workshop will teach students how to use Archives Portal Europe for research, and Transkribus for training Handwritten Text Recognition technology.
Students will work into teams to conduct research on Archives Portal Europe and transcribe documents in Transkribus in order to create training data for Handwritten Text Recognition. A prize will be awarded to the most productive team.
The Archives Portal Europe Foundation is a consortium of more than 30 national archives in Europe that are aggregating their digital catalogues and digitised collection into one single research engines: Archives Portal Europe (APE). It allows researchers  to conduct simultaneous and multilingual searches into hundreds of archives around Europe, making new comparisons between different archival holdings.
Transkribus is a free platform created by the University of Innsbruck as part of the READ project, where users work with digitised images and transcripts to train algorithms to recognise handwritten historical text.  The technology can be applied to digitised documents of various dates, languages and layouts producing automated transcriptions and searchable text.      
Programme:
13:00              Archives Portal Europe tutorial
13:30              Archives Portal Europe research session
14:30              Coffee break
15:00              Transkribus tutorial
15:30              Transkribus transcription session
16:30              Coffee break & Prize giving
17:00              Final remarks and feedback
17:30             Event closes
Preparation
Participants should bring their own laptop to the workshop
Participants should register for a Transkribus account and install the platform on their laptop in advance of the workshop: https://transkribus.eu/
Attendance
Attendance is free but registration is required at this link:  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/archives-portal-europe-transcribathon-tickets-51456180822
The event is particularly aimed at graduate research students in the Humanities who have some experience of historical research and transcription., but anyone with an interest in archival research and digital methodologies is also welcome.
For enquiries, please contact Marta Musso (marta.musso@kcl.ac.uk) or Louise Seaward (louise.seaward@ucl.ac.uk)
This event was organised in part by the READ project.  The READ project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 674943