Demystifying Digitisation: a hands-on Master Class in text digitisation: Antwerp, 29-30 September 16

Demystifying Digitisation: A Hands-On Master Class in Text Digitisation, which is part of the Antwerp Summer Academy and jointly organised by DARIAH-BE & DHuF (Digital Humanities Flanders).

This two-day workshop, which will take place from 29 to 30 September 2016 at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, preceding the DiXiT + ESTS 2016 conference hosted at the same location.

The core of the our programme consists of two half-day workshops on software packages that may help the researcher automate some aspects of the transcription and text digitization process process. The first will deal with ABBYY, still one of the best software packages around for OCRing printed digitised print materials. Focusing on the software’s possible advantages and pitfalls, this workshop will show the participants how to prepare their documents in order to achieve the best OCR results. The second workshop will introduce Transkribus, a software package that has recently made great advancements in optically recognising characters in handwritten materials. The programme is completed by 4 (interactive) sessions on related topics, including mass digitisation, digitisation project workflows and Copyright issues and Internet Property Rights related to digitization projects.

Further information about the programme can be found here

The entire programme is free of charge, but registration is required. To register please complete this registration form (before 21 September 2016).

The core workshops are limited to 20 participants each, while the other sessions are open to a larger public. Participants are asked to bring their own corpus to the workshops, consisting of scans of both printed and handwritten materials (more detailed information will follow). The workshops do not demand any prerequisite skills, but a basic knowledge of XML is considered a strong advantage. Places will be distributed on a first-come-first-served basis, but we will keep a number of places reserved for members of DHu.F. and DARIAH-BE.  The workshop will be held in English. Since places are limited, early registration is highly recommended.

We look forward to welcoming you to Antwerp!

Sally Chambers, Wout Dillen, Mike Kestemont, Trudi Noordermeer, Dirk van Hulle Demystifying Digitisation Organising Committee