Charting the European D-SEA: Digital Scholarship in East Asian Studies

Colin Brisson

This workshop aims to equip participants with foundational knowledge and practical skills necessary for the automatic transcription of Sinographic manuscripts and printed books.

The workshop will be conducted in two parts. We will begin with a brief overview of the objectives and the current state of the art in the field of automatic transcription of historical documents, highlighting how it diverges from traditional OCR techniques. Participants will then be guided through the critical steps involved and the data formats employed, through hands-on training using eScriptorium, an open-source annotation platform.
Subsequently, we will introduce the specialized tools developed specifically for processing Sinographic documents. We will guide you through using these tools to transcribe your own images.

Prerequisites:
No prior knowledge is required. Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops. If desired, they can prepare a selection of images to test the models. The first part of the workshop will be conducted using an online instance of eScriptorium. For the second part will use Jupyter Notebooks, which can be run on your own machine or using Google Colab (a Google account is required).