Related papers: Making History Readable
Digitizing cultural heritage collections has become crucial for preservation of historical artifacts and enhancing their availability to the wider public. Galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions) are actively…
This poster addresses accessibility issues of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in digital libraries (DLs). ETDs are available primarily as PDF files, which present barriers to equitable access, especially for users with visual…
Most tools for accessing digitized historical newspapers emphasize relatively simple search; but, as increasing numbers of digitized historical newspapers and other historical resources become available we can consider much richer modes of…
Historical Document Processing is the process of digitizing written material from the past for future use by historians and other scholars. It incorporates algorithms and software tools from various subfields of computer science, including…
This paper describes the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts, the only Internet-accessible collection of digital documents allowing the user to 1) dynamically create customized, typographically readable documents on demand, 2) search the…
Document parsing (DP) transforms unstructured or semi-structured documents into structured, machine-readable representations, enabling downstream applications such as knowledge base construction and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).…
In any search-based digital library (DL) systems dealing with a non-trivial number of documents, users are often required to go through a long list of short document descriptions in order to identify what they are looking for. To tackle the…
Accessibility to historical documents is mostly limited to scholars. This is due to the language barrier inherent in human language and the linguistic properties of these documents. Given a historical document, modernization aims to…
This paper is concerned with tracking and interpreting scholarly documents in distributed research communities. We argue that current approaches to document description, and current technological infrastructures particularly over the World…
The recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution has opened transformative possibilities for the humanities, particularly in unlocking the visual-artistic content embedded in historical illuminated manuscripts. While digital archives now…
In response to several cultural heritage initiatives at the Jagiellonian University, we developed a new digitization workflow in collaboration with the Jagiellonian Library (JL). The solution is based on easy-to-access technological…
The adoption of tablets with touchscreens and styluses is increasing, and a key feature is converting handwriting to text, enabling search, indexing, and AI assistance. Meanwhile, vision-language models (VLMs) are now the go-to solution for…
Combining computational technologies and humanities is an ongoing effort aimed at making resources such as texts, images, audio, video, and other artifacts digitally available, searchable, and analyzable. In recent years, deep neural…
Prior study shows that pre-training techniques can boost the performance of visual document understanding (VDU), which typically requires models to gain abilities to perceive and reason both document texts and layouts (e.g., locations of…
Research units in archaeology often manage large and precious archives containing various documents, including reports on fieldwork, scholarly studies and reference books. These archives are of course invaluable, recording decades of work,…
Accessibility of tables on websites for Visually Impaired Persons (VIP) is not optimal with screen readers which are not always effective for the recovery of visual information (2D). Actual Web/Multimedia technologies are not taking in…
This paper addresses the issue of making legacy information (that material held in paper format only) electronically searchable and retrievable. We used proprietary software and commercial hardware to create a process for scanning,…
Hybrid technologies enable the blending of physical and digital elements, creating new ways to experience and interact with the world. Such technologies can transform engagement with relics, both secular and sacred but they present…
Efficiently navigating and understanding academic papers is crucial for scientific progress. Traditional linear formats like PDF and HTML can cause cognitive overload and obscure a paper's hierarchical structure, making it difficult to…
Many libraries offer free access to digitised historical newspapers via user interfaces. After an initial period of search and filter options as the only features, the availability of more advanced tools and the desire for more options…