TRACER tutorial, Rome 2017

Photo of a fingerprintWe’re very pleased to announce that eTRAP will be giving a text reuse tutorial in collaboration with DiXiT at the annual conference of the Italian Association for Digital Humanities (AIUCD) in Rome, Italy, this coming January!

The tutorial will run on 23rd and 24th January at the Sapienza University in Rome.

The tutorial builds on eTRAP’s research activities, most of which deploy our TRACER machine. TRACER is a suite of algorithms aimed at investigating text reuse in multifarious corpora, be those prose, poetry, in Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek or medieval German. TRACER provides researchers with statistical information about the texts under investigation and its integrated reuse visualiser, TRAViz, displays the reuses in a more readable format for further study.

This tutorial seeks to teach participants to independently understand, use and run TRACER. For the purpose of the tutorial and to ensure the smoothest possible outcome, participants will initially be working on an English data-set provided by eTRAP. Depending on the overall progress, we may also allocate some time to investigating the participants’ own data-sets, provided these comply with the TRACER format. A detailed description of the tutorial can be DOWNLOADED HERE.

The workshop will be conducted in English, with assistance in Italian should it be necessary. For more information about previous editions of this tutorial, visit our Events page.

Eligibility, Requirements and Bursaries

If you’re interested in exploring text reuse between two or multiple texts (in the same language) and would like to learn how to do it semi-automatically, then this tutorial is for you. In order to provide everyone with adequate (technical) assistance, the workshop can only accommodate 12 participants. To apply to the tutorial, please send a short CV and a brief motivation letter to contact(at)etrap(dot)eu by 16th December 2016. Those accepted will have to register for the AIUCD conference at https://www.conftool.net/aiucd2017/

La Sapienza University makes available travel bursaries for early career researchers, who submit an abstract to the EADH day. Should you be eligible for the bursary and wish to attend our tutorial, you must submit both an abstract to EADH and a CV with motivation letter to eTRAP. You may also apply for the tutorial without an EADH submission but you will not be eligible for a bursary in that case.

We look forward to seeing you in beautiful Rome!

Transkribus: A User Report

Melina Jander, an eTRAP Research Assistant, has written a short user report on our experience with the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tool Transkribus. We’re currently using Transkribus as part of our pilot project TrAIN (Tracing Authorship In Noise), which aims at defining the noise-threshold that affects computational analyses on HTR’d and OCR’d texts . How much noise do we have to correct? How much can we leave in?

The report describes progress made thus far. A second report will be published in 2017 to report on Transkribus‘ automation process on our data.

You can download the report from our Output page.

2016-11-04 Update: The Transkribus website advertises our user report here.