Sadek, Jawad;
Vlachidis, Andreas;
Pickering, Victoria;
Humbel, Marco;
Metilli, Daniele;
Carine, Mark;
Nyhan, Julianne;
(2024)
Leveraging OCR and HTR cloud services towards data mobilisation of historical plant names.
International Journal of Digital Humanities
10.1007/s42803-024-00091-4.
(In press).
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Abstract
We present our solution to the problem of how to mobilise (that is, extract and enrich) digital data from the analogue, printed book version Sir Hans Sloane’s copy of John Ray’s Historia Plantarum, to create the first searchable facility of its kind to the plants contained in the Sloane Herbarium, housed in the National History Museum UK. The data mobilisation workflow presented here enables the automatic detection of printed and handwritten marginalia text and annotations in Sir Hans Sloane” personal copy of John Ray’s Historia Plantarum. The rationale of adopting AWS Amazon’s Textract service and the development of a specialised information extraction workflow for mobilising printed text and handwritten annotations is discussed. Testing of our workflow demonstrates the need for human-checking of outputs to ensure the accuracy of a large set of structured data comprising 7600 plant names and 4540 handwritten marginalia annotation. The links we have created serve as the first digital index to Sloan’s Herbarium, a unique development in the longer analogue and digital format-history of these resources.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Leveraging OCR and HTR cloud services towards data mobilisation of historical plant names |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s42803-024-00091-4 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-024-00091-4 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | OCR, Handwritten text recognition, Historical documents, Marginalia annotation, Botanical specimen, Herbarium |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10201270 |
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