Merve Tekgürler | Ottoman Transkribus: Training an HTR+ Model for 18th century Ottoman Paleography
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 21/05/2021

Merve Tekgürler | Stanford University

Handwritten text recognition (HTR) has emerged as an important method for digital humanities practice in the last decade, especially for the field of history. However, not all historical languages are supported by this new text recognition technology. Advances are especially slow when it comes to non-English, non-European languages. Hence the barriers to adopt DH methods, especially for textual analysis, are higher for some historians than others. Ottoman Turkish (OT), which was the language of the administration of the Ottoman Empire (1299/1302-1918), is among less accessible historical languages for DH research. This is due to the fact that OT was written in Arabic script and modern historical transcription conventions use latinized transcription alphabets, following the alphabet reform of Modern Turkish (MT). Additionally, not all vowels are written out or represented in the OT, whereas MT has 8 vowels, each with a letter assigned to it. As a result, the process of learning to transcribe is both a process of adjusting to a new script with a reversed writing direction (OT is Right to Left, whereas MT is Left to Right) and adding vowels. Due to these and many other difficulties, so far there is not even a full-text keyword search option in the Ottoman State Archives. Considering that there are over 40 million scanned pages currently available in the Archives, the need for a text recognition tool becomes eminent. This talk will present initial results from developing a HTR model using, Transkribus, an EU-funded software package that is designed to train machine-learning based HTR models. The goal of this project is not only to make OT more accessible through HTR but also to create the basis upon which new DH focused research can be built, including but not limited to distance reading and natural language processing based approaches.


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