Project: Historical MANuscript Indexing for user-controlled Search
| Acronym | Himanis |
| Duration | 01/11/2015 - 31/10/2017 |
| Project Topic | Manuscripts are among the most important witnesses to our European shared cultural heritage. In recent years, large quantities of historical handwritten documents are being scanned and made available through web portals. Yet, the wealth of information conveyed by the text captured in these images remains largely inaccessible. General users and researchers more and more expect to query handwritten resources in plain text like printed books, but current handwritten text recognition technology is still far from offering sufficiently accurate transcripts on historical documents. This situation raises the need of searching approaches specifically designed for text images. HIMANIS aims at developing cost-effective solutions for querying large sets of handwritten document images. To this end, innovative keyword spotting, indexing and search methods are developed, tested, adapted and/or scaled up to meet the real world conditions required |
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Project Results (after finalisation) |
The creation of an unique collection for medieval studies through the digitisation of the Chancery corpus, covering 200 years of royal administration and justice in France and Europe. This corpus encompasses 199 volumes, representing 83.000 pages, with 64.830 royal charters in 175 registers, and 24 formularies and related resources, freely accessible to the general public. • As part of the digitisation, the curatorial restoration of 32 volumes of the corpus. • The development of novel technologies and cost-effective solutions allowing for the first time to perform image analysis, layout segmentation, line identification, handwritten text recognition, for querying large sets of handwritten document images. The partners applied this artificial intelligence to the 83.000 pages. • The creation of a unique user-friendly interface to access and query the CHANCERY corpus textual data, including crowdsourcing functionalities |
| Website | visit project website |
| Network | HERITAGE PLUS |
| Call | JPI Cultural Heritage and Global Change |
Project partner
| Number | Name | Role | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes | Coordinator | France |
| 2 | Universitat Politecnica de Valencia | Partner | Spain |
| 3 | ANALYSE D IMAGE ET INTELLIGENCE ARTIFICIELLE | Partner | France |
| 4 | Rijksuniversiteit Groningen | Partner | Netherlands |