From Analogue to Digital – AI for Text Recognition
A Guided Tour of the Digitisation Centre at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich
Reading historical manuscripts and prints can often be a challenge. At the Zurich Central Library, we use AI-powered text recognition to convert historical collections into digital text formats. This allows us to make them more widely available online and in databases.
This tour offers you a glimpse into our digitization center, where our valuable collections are translated into bits and bytes: high-quality digital versions of the documents form the basis for automatic text recognition. We’ll show you how we scan manuscripts from the 18th or 19th centuries and what precautions we take when digitizing medieval incunabula, which are as fragile as they are valuable.
In the second part, you’ll learn how we use AI transcriptions specifically to support research and discover our citizen science and editorial projects. You’ll also have the chance to try it out for yourself: use our scanning booth to have your handwritten text deciphered directly by the Transkribus software.
From Analogue to Digital – AI for Text Recognition
August 27 @ 17:00 - 18:30
Reading historical manuscripts and prints can often be a challenge. At the Zurich Central Library, we use AI-powered text recognition to convert historical collections into digital text formats. This allows us to make them more widely available online and in databases.
This tour offers you a glimpse into our digitization center, where our valuable collections are translated into bits and bytes: high-quality digital versions of the documents form the basis for automatic text recognition. We’ll show you how we scan manuscripts from the 18th or 19th centuries and what precautions we take when digitizing medieval incunabula, which are as fragile as they are valuable.
In the second part, you’ll learn how we use AI transcriptions specifically to support research and discover our citizen science and editorial projects. You’ll also have the chance to try it out for yourself: use our scanning booth to have your handwritten text deciphered directly by the Transkribus software.
