+ Exciting new partnerships for READ

The READ project is spreading its wings with some exciting new partnerships in Europe and beyond!

On our Network page, you can now see a full list of more than 50 institutions and projects who have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with us and started to test out our Handwritten Text Recognition technologies on all sorts of historical collections.

To give just a few examples of some new interesting new collaborations….

We are working with the researchers from a long-standing project, well-known to medieval scholars.  DEEDS (Documents of Early England Data Set) at the University of Toronto Libraries was founded by Professor Michael Gervers in 1975.  They will be using some of the huge datasets they have created over this time as training data for Handwritten Text Recognition.

Geopast, a historical research and genealogy consultancy based in Sydney, Australia is another recent collaborator.  The founder Neil Saunders is interested applying READ’s layout analysis to a collection of old postcards.  Can our tools detect the common features of postcards allowing them to be processed quickly by machines?

Northern Arizona University is one of our newest collaborators.  This institution is interested in integrating Handwritten Text Recognition into the workflow of the Peirce Edition Project, which is producing a 30 volume critical edition of the writings of the American philosopher and logician, Charles S. Peirce.   READ project technology should be able to help make Peirce’s innovative writings more readily available and searchable online.

We look forward to hearing more about the work of some of our MOU partners and other close collaborators at the upcoming Transkribus User Conference.  And if you would like to know more about joining our network, please send us an email!