This paper describes an on-going project of transcribing and annotating digitized manuscripts of medieval Spanish with paleographic and lexical information. We link lexical units from the manuscripts with the Multilingual Central Repository (MCR), making terms retrievable by any of the languages that integrate MCR. The goal of the project is twofold: creating a paleographic knowledge base from ...

In this paper, we report a databank development project in which structured textual data from historical documents are extracted to provide information access of higher data granularity. The availability of the databank opens up tremendous opportunities for research topics in government personnel systems that were limited by data acquisition difficulty in the past. The project demonstrates the ...

In this paper we describe a method for improving the optical character recognition (OCR) toolkit Tesseract for Finnish historical documents. First we create a model for Finnish Fraktur fonts. Second we test Tesseract with the created Fraktur model and Antiqua model on single images and combinations of images with different image preprocessing methods. Against commercial ABBYY FineReader toolkit...

This descriptive study explores deliberate barriers to user participation on the long-lived discussion site Metafilter.com. Metafilter has been in continuous operation since its founding in 1999, and at the time of this writing has around 12,000 active users. While many newer online sites appear eager to eliminate barriers to participation and recruit as many new members as possible, Metafilter...

The recognition of script in historical documents requires suitable techniques in order to identify single words. Segmentation of lines and words is a challenging task because lines are not straight and words may intersect within and between lines. For correct word segmentation, the conventional analysis of distances between text objects needs to be supplemented by a second component predicting...

We introduce weak morphisms of higher dimensional automata and use them to define preorder relations for HDAs, among which homeomor-phic abstraction and trace equivalent abstraction. It is shown that homeomor-phic abstraction is essentially always stronger than trace equivalent abstraction. We also define the trace language of an HDA and show that, for a large class of HDAs, it is invariant und...

This paper focuses on a set of structured document applications that we have denoted databases of historical documents. The information into these documents is closely related to the time in which they are created while being still of great usefulness in the future. The main contribution of this paper is the formulation of a group of operators and predicates that express retrieval conditions ov...

The China Historical GIS project is developing a set of free tools and datasets covering the geographic space that has, at one time or another, been nominally part of China. The idea is to provide a generic digital platform for historical places that can be seamlessly integrated with a wide variety of contemporary GIS data, but which is not tied to a single data source. The CHGIS data model ena...