Unorthodox structures? P2PaLA on Orthodox birth registers | Albert Ludwig Roine #TUC22
Channel: Transkribus
Date: 2022-10-10

Albert Ludwig Roine, National Archives of Estonia
Unorthodox structures? P2PaLA on Orthodox birth registers
In 2020 our archive started a project to make Orthodox birth registers usable for genealogists. The historical sources from the 19th century are quite hard to read for ordinary people but fortunately Transkribus text-recognition solves that problem almost completely. This made it possible to take an ambitious step forward and focus on digging data from certain specific structures inside of these historical sources.
Orthodox birth records are hard-to-recognize, table formatted church records. We focused on digging information from only a small, most interesting part of the source material. With advanced layout analysis tool P2PaLA, we have worked with only two main text regions - child’s name and general information of parents. In this presentation, instead of focusing on text-recognition, we will show the results of the work done with P2PaLA. As layout analysis is a key component for successful text-recognition experience, we want to share our experiences on the topic and share the discovery that tables with specific structure are never as specific as you would expect them to be.