Automating the transcription of historical Chinese manuscripts (PhD Placement)
Automating the transcription of historical Chinese manuscripts (PhD Placement)
Automating the transcription of historical Chinese manuscripts (PhD Placement)
This project aims to ‘teach’ software how to read historical Chinese handwritten texts. This placement sits within the British Library’s Digital Research Team, which has been working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technologies. The British Library has been digitising books, manuscripts, newspapers, and more for decades – but OCR/HTR enhances the searchability of digitised collections and enables digital research analysis at scale. The placement builds upon the successful completion of the Lotus Sutra Manuscripts Digitisation Project, through which the Library has conserved, catalogued and digitised nearly 800 Lotus Sutra manuscripts from Dunhuang in Chinese. The Lotus Sutra is one of the main Buddhist scriptures and the canonical edition has already been transcribed. The PhD student will use the project’s digitised content and existing transcriptions to continue our pilot work with HTR platforms to create bespoke training models for the automatic transcription of Lotus Sutra scrolls and other manuscript materials digitised as part of the International Dunhuang Project (IDP). Funder(s): AHRC Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP.
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