Scholars
Are you transcribing historical documents? Handwritten or printed, from the middle ages or from the 20th century? Would you like to do this in a highly standardized, flexible and reliable way? And do you appreciate to get support from automated tools such as Handwritten Text Recognition and Layout Analysis?
Archives
Are you responsible for large collections of handwritten and printed documents? Do you believe that digitisation paves the way to realise new opportunities to access, enrich and explore archival material? And are you open to involve humanities scholars and volunteers so that they can work with these documents in an effective way – producing data which can also be integrated in your repository?
Volunteers
Are historical letters, postcards, manuscripts or medieval documents fascinating for you? Do you enjoy deciphering handwriting – this wonderful feeling when you can read something which may be hidden to most other people? And do you believe that everyone can make a valuable contribution to scholarship and science?
Scientists
Are you a computer scientist and working in the fields of computer vision, document analysis, pattern recognition, natural language processing or a related field? You are seeking interesting documents from 1000 years of handwriting, printing and publishing? And you would really enjoy to get some reference data in a well-acknowledged format, such as PAGE?
Humanities Scholars
TRANSKRIBUS enables you to:
- register in the platform
- download an expert tool specifically designed for your needs
- upload your own documents/images
- manage your own private collection (no one else has access to your documents!)
- segment the images into blocks, lines/baselines and words with the support of layout analysis tools
- link the text with the image which increases the value of your transcription significantly (actually you cannot transcribe text without linking!)
- transcribe text in any language and with any character set (load your own virtual keyboard)
- export your documents at every time in several formats such as TEI, RTF, PDF, XML.
- once you have properly transcribed e.g. 100 images you may inform us and we will train an HTR engine from the Computational Intelligence Technology Lab (CITlab) of the University of Rostock on your documents and
- you will be able to transcribe further pages of your documents with the support of automatically produced handwritten text.
Get started!
- Register
- Download Transkribus
- Try out some test documents with automatically produced full-text in the TranskribusCloud collection
Archives and Libraries
TRANSKRIBUS enables you to
- satisfy the needs of your users who are working with your documents by keeping full control over your documents. With TRANSKRIBUS humanities scholars will get one of the most advanced transcription tools currently available. But what counts most: Transcriptions will not get “lost” on the private computers of your users, but will also be available for enriching your document collection and for getting integrated into your repositories in a standardized and seamless way.
- organise crowd-sourcing projects with a minimum of effort. Based on the experiences of one of the most successful crowd-sourcing projects “Transcribe Bentham” your crowd-users will work with a dedicated crowd-sourcing interface which was developed by the University College London in close cooperation with the University London Computer Centre and which is also part of the TRANSKRIBUS platform.
Now, this sounds interesting, but it starts to get really exciting if you consider that
- once your collaborators have properly transcribed at least 100 pages it will be possible to train a cutting edge HTR engine developed by the Computational Intelligence Technology Lab (CITlab) of the University of Rostock and to recognise the rest of the documents in an automated way. The results of the automated transcription are amazing, and the good news is that the more data are available for training the HTR engine, the more will it be possible to improve the recognition accuracy.
Interested?
- Request more information – we are happy to answer your questions.
- Register in the platform
- Download TRANSKRIBUS
- Try out the tool – so you will get an impression about the working environment of your collaborators and volunteers.
- Upload some test documents (or just some images) to your private collection to make first experiments with your own documents (don’t worry, no one else will be able to access them).
Volunteers
TRANSKRIBUS enables you
- to work with your own documents! In this case you will be able to
- use the same tool as “professional scholars” – your contributions will therefore be of the same high quality which is required for serious science
- upload your own documents (or those from your grandparents, relatives, etc…) to the platform
- keep full control on the documents (don’t worry it is you who decides who has access to the documents)
- involve other users who may support you in the transcription of your documents or even to engage a professional transcription service who can do the transcription for you)
- export your documents not only as RTF (Word file) but also as PDF (with the image in the foreground and the text in the background)
Second, TRANSKRIBUS enables you to contribute to the transcription of documents made available by humanities scholars or archives seeking support for their research. In this case you will be able to:
- make a valuable and well-acknowledged contribution to ongoing transcription projects
- use either the full-featured TRANSKRIBUS tool or to
- access a simplified, web-based tool which was developed by the University College London in cooperation with the University London Computer Centre
Scientists
TRANSKRIBUS will enable you
- to register in the platform and stay informed about interesting transcription projects
- to upload your own images and run them against some tools developed in the FP7 project tranScriptorium
- to use the TRANSKRIBUS tool for annotating your own data with regions of interest and to store the results as PAGE file (similar to ALETHEIA from USAL)
- to communicate with interested humanities scholars and archives on the basis of clearly defined reference data and benchmarks (work on the same documents, store several versions of the same document)
But what is really exciting is that TRANSKRIBUS is also a way to have a beautiful environment for your research results. It enables you
- to expose your tool in a well-known computer environment (CentOS, WindowsServer) with clearly defined input-output formats (PAGE in, PAGE out)
- to gather feedback from a variety of users such as humanities scholars and volunteers
- to see your tools running without taking care of the overall system (document management, user management, storage, bandwidth, support, communication,…)
Next steps
- Contact us!
- Register in the platform
- Download TRANSKRIBUS and try it out