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“Enhancing OCR with AI for Historical Documents” an open lecture on 23th April

Dr. Wolfgang Göderle.
Image courtesy of Max-Planck-Institute: https://www.shh.mpg.de/person/132272/2267942

Next Tuesday 23th April (CEST 16:30) Dr. Wolfgang Göderle (Max-Planck-Institute) will give a talk titled “Enhancing OCR with AI for Historical Documents” as a part of Sloane Lab Symposium series. This event is organized in collaboration with the Humanities Data Science & Methodology (HDSM) Oberseminar of TU Darmstadt, the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) and the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies (UCL IAS).

During the presentation, Dr. Göderle will discuss the collaborative usage of AI and ICR technologies in the analysis of the documents dating back to 18th-20th centuries. Below is the abstract of the speech:

A Breakthrough in the Research on Habsburg State-Manuals State manuals are a quite common source in European modern history. For Habsburg Central Europe, 155 volumes of the so-called Hof- und Staatsschematismus document the evolution of the social elites of the Habsburg Monarchy from 1702 to 1918. However, the nested and complex structure of these documents has so far effectively prevented any large-scale extraction of the information contained in the Schematismus. We developed an extraction pipeline that allows to effectively process the information stored in these documents at scale. First, we identified and trained a suitable CNN (YOLOv9) to perform layout detection. The model identifies the smaller text modules that make up the pages and forwards them to a finetuned state-of-the-art OCR engine (currently Kraken OCR). Post-processing, we perform entity recognition & re-assemble the extracted information in the correct order to prepare the data for exportation into a graph database.

The event is held in online format. In order to attend the lecture please follow instructions on Eventbrite page.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
valentinaprishchepova (April 16, 2024). “Enhancing OCR with AI for Historical Documents” an open lecture on 23th April. HDSM. Retrieved June 15, 2025 from https://hdsm.hypotheses.org/3006


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