Transkribus & Magazines:
#SmartData in the #DigitalHumanities

This series of Medium stories tells how I found Kindred Spirits by exploring the vibrant communities of Citizen Scientists and Citizen Historians having “serious fun” as part of cutting edge #DigitalHumanities applied research projects doing transcription and recognition of Historic Handwritten Text Documents.

  1. “Transkribus & Magazines — #SmartData in the #DigitalHumanities”
  2. “A Bit of Context — About FactMiners & The Softalk Apple Project”
  3. “Finding Kindred Spirits among Explorers of Our Cultural Fingerprint Before Print”
  4. “My Wish List for a ‘Magazine-Friendly’ Edition of Transkribus”
  5. “Transkribus’ Transcription & Recognition Platform (TRP) as Social Machine: Raising the Bar for Crowdsourcing Citizen Science”

#SmartData in the #DigitalHumanities

This “Transkribus & Magazines” series of Medium stories is not a rigorous review of the awesome Transkribus application and its associated free eResearch service generously provided by the University of Innsbruck to support digital scholarship. I’ll leave that task to anyone more experienced and qualified to do it than I am.

Rather this thread of stories is a public “letter of introduction” to the brilliant academic researchers in Innsbruck who have created the Transkribus Transcription & Recognition Platform (TRP).

Through these stories I want to make the case for a “win-win” collaboration between the Transkribus and FactMiners projects; a collaboration where our projects bring in a complementary interest — the rigorous study of commercial print magazines — into the prospective community of users of the Transkribus Transcription & Recognition Platform.

Transkribus was created as part of the University of Innsbruck’s contribution to the tranScriptorium eResearch consortium. tranScriptorium is a funded consortium of European academic research and cultural heritage institutions working together to develop, in their words, “innovative, efficient, and cost-effective solutions for the indexing, search and full transcription of historical handwritten document images, using modern, holistic Handwritten Text Recognition (#HTR) technology.”

My interest, expressed through the applied research agenda of FactMiners.org and The Softalk Apple Project has nothing to do with the consortium’s core focus on historical handwritten documents, yet there is a cross-current of similarities in our research objectives and solution designs that suggest we explore the opportunity for fruitful “win-win” collaboration.

On to “A Bit of Context — About FactMiners & The Softalk Apple Project”…