2017 Charleston Library Conference

Digital Humanities is an exciting area of scholarship that is continually evolving; empowered by the latest technology. Adam Matthew Digital is the first primary source publisher to utilise Artificial Intelligence to offer transformative search capabilities with Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for its manuscript collections. This presentation will look at the history of automated search through OCR and the implications of HTR for the library and scholarly community and its potential impact on crowdsourced transcription initiatives. The panel will also look at HTR in action searching manuscripts spanning the 17th-19th Centuries from collections sourced from the British Library and The National Archives, UK. Video will be used to showcase additional feedback from scholars and archivists working with HTR. This session will also look at a new Open Access publishing solution, that will enable libraries and archives to harness HTR technology across their manuscript collections and the impact this will have on the Digital Humanities and the Open Access community.