+ Report from the International Medieval Congress 2017

The International Medieval Congress is one of the biggest events for Medievalists from all over the world. For this year’s Congress more than 2,400 scholars and enthusiasts took the University of Leeds by storm and spent four days in the city on the River Aire.

The READ project presented our tools and research on two occasions.  On Monday morning, we had a packed room during the first time slot of the Congress. Representatives from READ partners in Passau (Elena Mühlbauer), Helsinki (Maria Kallio), and Zurich (Tobias Hodel) presented and demonstrated use-cases for table recognition, tagging and handwritten text recognition. The very fruitful discussion was not only led within the seminar room but also in real time by scholars on Twitter (see our Storify and a blog post by Tobias Hodel).

On Wednesday, people got a hands-on introduction in our Transkribus workshop. As always, it can be difficult to get to grips with the programme at first but thanks to a step-by-step guide by Maria Kallio all in attendance were able to test the tools, as well as the interface with their own documents or ones that we had pre-prepared documents. Elena Mühlbauer showed then how users can work with Transkribus to process documents laid out in tables.

Both events proved the enduring interest that Medievalists have in the tools and algorithms being developed within READ. Expect us back next year!