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READing Bentham’s handwriting – new project for Transcribe Bentham

By uczwlse, on 3 February 2016

Following last week’s fantastic achievement of over 15,000 transcribed pages, I wanted to tell you some about some more good news for Transcribe Bentham.

We are now part of a new project entitled Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents (READ). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 674943.

The READ project will develop new technology in order to enable computers to read and search historical manuscripts. This research on handwritten text recognition technology has the potential to open up access to all sorts of written material contained in archives across the world. It could also help our volunteer transcribers to untangle some of the complexities of Bentham’s handwriting.

Some of you will know that we have already begun to make use of handwritten text recognition in our TSX platform. Transcribers can ask the computer to assist them with their transcription – for example by asking it to give suggestions for a particular word or line which is hard to decipher. The READ project will develop this technology further and work on new innovations such as a transcription tool, a palaeography tutorial and a mobile application for digitising and organising historical documents.

You can find more information about the READ project on the Faculty of Laws webpage. As the project progress, we will keep you updated on our efforts to train computers to read Bentham!

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