Speaker

Dr James Cummings, Reader in Digital Textual Studies and Late Medieval Literature in the School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics at Newcastle University.

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is seemingly all the rage these days and AI plug-ins are turning up in many applications we use all the time. The creation of digital scholarly editions is not immune to the improvements promised by AI and there have been a number of developments which are poised to change the widespread accessibility of handwritten documents in archives. This talk is designed to be accessible to those with no previous experience of AI or any particular digital skills. The talk will attempt to demystify some of the ways that AI is being talked about, what it is and what it isn’t, the production of digital scholarly editions, and it will look at the way that digital tools are transforming how we engage with handwritten texts.

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is an AI technology which, with some training, enables a computer to model and transcribe handwritten documents, including ancient or medieval ones. Moreover, HTR can be used on printed texts that are difficult to process (like early newspapers or texts with complicated structured formatting) where older technologies like Optical Character Recognition often fail. Increasingly, HTR will mean that archives can more easily make vast collections of handwritten texts available online over the next couple of decades. And yet, some of these will need editors to gloss and explain their contents and contexts to readers. This talk will look at how these developments are changing the creation of digital scholarly editions and the opportunities they afford for lowering barriers to readers.

Access

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