A Tale of Two Transcriptions : Machine-Assisted Transcription of Historical Sources
Thorvaldsen, Gunnar (University of Tromsø. Norwegian Historical Data Centre)
Pujadas-Mora, Joana Maria 1977- (Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics)
Andersen, Trygve (University of Tromsø. Norwegian Historical Data Centre)
Eikvil, Line (Norwegian Computing Center)
Lladós, Josep (Centre de Visió per Computador)
Fornes Bisquerra, Alicia (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Ciències de la Computació)
Cabré, Anna 1943- (Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics)

Fecha:	2015
Resumen:	This article explains how two projects implement semi-automated transcription routines: for census sheets in Norway and marriage protocols from Barcelona. The Spanish system was created to transcribe the marriage license books from 1451 to 1905 for the Barcelona area; one of the world's longest series of preserved vital records. Thus, in the Project "Five Centuries of Marriages" (5CofM) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona's Center for Demographic Studies, the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database has been built. More than 600,000 records were transcribed by 150 transcribers working online. The Norwegian material is cross-sectional as it is the 1891 census, recorded on one sheet per person. This format and the underlining of keywords for several variables made it more feasible to semi-automate data entry than when many persons are listed on the same page. While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for printed text is scientifically mature, computer vision research is now focused on more difficult problems such as handwriting recognition. In the marriage project, document analysis methods have been proposed to automatically recognize the marriage licenses. Fully automatic recognition is still a challenge, but some promising results have been obtained. In Spain, Norway and elsewhere the source material is available as scanned pictures on the Internet, opening up the possibility for further international cooperation concerning automating the transcription of historic source materials. Like what is being done in projects to digitize printed materials, the optimal solution is likely to be a combination of manual transcription and machine-assisted recognition also for hand-written sources.
Ayudas:	European Commission 20100407
Derechos:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Lengua:	Anglès
Documento:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Materia:	Nominative sources ; Census ; Vital records ; Computer vision ; Optical character recognition ; Word spotting
Publicado en:	Historical life course studies, Vol. 2 (January 2015) , p. 1-19, ISSN 2352-6343

DOI: 10.51964/hlcs9355

21 p, 2.1 MB

El registro aparece en las colecciones:
Documentos de investigación > Documentos de los grupos de investigación de la UAB > Centros y grupos de investigación (producción científica) > Ciencias sociales y jurídicas > Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED-CERCA)
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