Markus Müller of the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz has become enthousiastic about Transkribus. He got to know the application better through a ReIReS workshop, and is now making others enthusiastic about it.

During a recent OCR-Workshop in Mainz, DH specialist Monika Barget presented different developments in OCR technology and focused on the opportunities and problems of the popular “machine learning” approach. The advantage is the great adaptability to different fonts and original page layouts. However, the preparation of the necessary “trainings” is demanding while the installation of memory intensive software can fail on small computers.

After that, Markus Müller presented Transkribus as an example of a specialized, yet user-friendly OCR software, whereby he used the insights he gained from Anna Skolimowska’s (Warsaw) presentation during a previous ReIReS workshop. While Skolimowaska works with manuscripts, Müller applies Transkribus on printed texts from the 16th century in order to search for differences between various editions of the same book.

Transkribus is a service application for handwritten text recognition (HTR) and a very nice and easy to nice client software for all steps of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process.

Download the presentation here.

Markus Müller, IEG

 

Anna Skolimowska, University of Warsaw, presenting Transkribus in February 2019.