“Leveraging OCR and HTR cloud services towards data mobilisation of historical plant names”- New Article by Prof. J. Nyhan and Dr. M. Humbel
We are delighted to announce the release of the article on “Leveraging OCR and HTR cloud services towards data mobilisation of historical plant names”, co-authored by our colleagues Prof. Julianne Nyhan and Dr. Marco Humbel. The text is available in open access. To download it, please navigate to the following link.
The abstract of the article is as follows:
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.

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
valentinaprishchepova (November 14, 2024). “Leveraging OCR and HTR cloud services towards data mobilisation of historical plant names”- New Article by Prof. J. Nyhan and Dr. M. Humbel. HDSM. Retrieved May 16, 2025 from https://hdsm.hypotheses.org/4857