Credit: CC0 Public Domain
Posted on 08/14/2021 7:20:25 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The Abbey Library of St. Gall in Switzerland is home to approximately 160,000 volumes of literary and historical manuscripts dating back to the eighth century—all of which are written by hand, on parchment, in languages rarely spoken in modern times.
To preserve these historical accounts of humanity, such texts, numbering in the millions, have been kept safely stored away in libraries and monasteries all over the world. A significant portion of these collections are available to the general public through digital imagery, but experts say there is an extraordinary amount of material that has never been read—a treasure trove of insight into the world's history hidden within.
Now, researchers at University of Notre Dame are developing an artificial neural network to read complex ancient handwriting based on human perception to improve capabilities of deep learning transcription...
Scheirer said challenges remain. His team is working on improving accuracy of transcriptions, especially in the case of damaged or incomplete documents, as well as how to account for illustrations or other aspects of a page that could be confusing to the network.
However, the team was able to adjust the program to transcribe Ethiopian texts, adapting it to a language with a completely different set of characters—a first step toward developing a program with the capability to transcribe and translate information for users.
(Excerpt) Read more at techxplore.com ...
I love stuff like this!
“Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”
Your taxes are...any nonpayment of said taxes will result in
bookmark
golf clap - well played
Heh … Galen approves of this message!
Very cool.
THE
DUCK
FLIES
AT
MIDNIGHT
Epstinius didn’t kill himself
Yet the phrase, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” is still indecipherable.
Interesting article, Sunken Civ. The true usefulness of this technique remains to be seen.
What is undeniable is that the Ancient Abby Library of St. Gallen is stunning. The architecture and the number of ancient documents they have preserved for over a thousand years is simply breathtaking. I last visited this world famous site several years ago. The Irish influence in medieval Switzerland is a strange historical fact.
Thanks for posting this.
Oldplayer
Sigh!
Regards,
“There are thousands of old American newspapers and magazines (including military base newsletters, church bulletins, school newspapers, etc.) that are moldering away in libraries and archives or in people’s attics.”
A case in point was a trunk that a widow had that had belonged her husband, who had been on the staff of General George Patton.
Long after her husband died a Patton biographer came to see her looking for information. She had her granddaughter take the man into the attic to “poke through the trunk” to see if he found anything interesting.
On top were the usual things; medals, awards, letters, etc.
Underneath were some soldiers souvenirs like Lugar pistols, nice German binoculars, Nazi flags and so on.
Under THAT was the treasure!
Some notes in a diary book the officer had written during the war.
And THEN...
A complete copy of the Orders of Movement for Third Army. From the day Patton took command until the day he was relieved. The biographer was over the moon! Those Orders would fill in quite a number of holes.
Another note...
When Sgt Bill Guarnere of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, in the 101st Airborne Division
died in 2014 his family cleaned out his house in preparation of selling it.
When the new owners took possession they noticed a ratty old trunk in the attic.
In it were Sgt Guarnere’s letters from home during the war, souviners from the war, his separation and disability papers and letters he exchanged with men still fighting in Europe.
Fortunately the new owners got in contact with the family and turned the trunk and contents over to them.
How many times has something like that ratty old trunk been thrown away with valuable memorabilia inside.
More times than I like to think about.
I once supported a DOD project that began in 1986. By 1994, there were more than a million pages of documents, all highly technical and classified. The customer decided that the history of the project, which invented and developed a lot of cutting edge technology, had to be preserved.
A group of 12 senior people were assigned the task of scanning all those documents, making sense of the primitive OCR translations of the time. Four teams of three people, 8 hour shifts, 2 shifts per day, 7 days per week.. It took them nearly six months.
With AI assistance and todays document scanning technology, they would have been finished in one month.
Of course, in 1995 the Russian military put so much material on the open market, in a desperate bid for foreign capital, that we simply bought what we wanted on the open market and dropped half the project.
I always wondered if there was some way to scan/translate all those cuneiform tablets that are gathering dust in the museums. Perhaps this method could be applied there.
There are thousands of old American newspapers and magazines
—
‘Old’ here means anything in print before 1980.
HA!
‘Old’ here means anything in print before 1980.
Are you claiming that everything printed after 1980 is available online?
Including Eureka Junior College's student newspaper's Feb. 1981 "blockbuster" issue?
Online?
Really?
Regards,
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