Category Archives: oa.ocr

Preserving Cultural Heritage: Transkribus Integration with Wikimedia Projects – READ-COOP

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“As of July 2023, Transkribus is proud to be a text recognition engine on Wikisource, which is an online digital library of public domain and freely licensed source texts and historical documents, and a sister project of Wikipedia. 

Preserving and sharing historical knowledge is more important than ever, but the task of transcribing and making historical manuscripts accessible is not without its challenges, which is why innovative organisations join forces towards a common goal. 

The Wikimedia Foundation — the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, Wikisource, and other free knowledge Wikimedia projects — and Transkribus have recently started an exciting collaboration that began with the Wikisources Loves Manuscripts project, which is inspired by the digitisation and transcription of historical Balinese manuscripts. In this article, we will explain how this partnership came about and look at how Transkribus can benefit the Wikisource community. Additionally, we will show you how to use Transkribus within the Wikisource platform for a seamless transcription process….”

AI Making Ancient Japanese Texts More Accessible | NVIDIA Blog

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“Natural disasters aren’t just threats to people and buildings, they can also erase history — by destroying rare archival documents. As a safeguard, scholars in Japan are digitizing the country’s centuries-old paper records, typically by taking a scan or photo of each page.

But while this method preserves the content in digital form, it doesn’t mean researchers will be able to read it. Millions of physical books and documents were written in an obsolete script called Kuzushiji, legible to fewer than 10 percent of Japanese humanities professors….”

Attitudes of North American Academics toward Open Access Scholarly Journals

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Abstract:  In this study, the authors examine attitudes of researchers toward open access (OA) scholarly journals. Using two-step cluster analysis to explore survey data from faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers at large North American research institutions, two different cluster types emerge: Those with a positive attitude toward OA and a desire to reach the nonscholarly audience groups who would most benefit from OA (“pro-OA”), and those with a more negative, skeptical attitude and less interest in reaching nonscholarly readers (“non-OA”). The article explores these cluster identities in terms of position type, subject discipline, and productivity, as well as implications for policy and practice.