How to facilitate HTR work, a study of Transkribus free processing requests | Joe Nockels #TUC22
Channel: Transkribus
Date: 2022-10-10

Joe Nockels, University of Edinburgh; University of Glasgow; National Library of Scotland
How best to facilitate HTR work, a study of Transkribus free processing requests 
This presentation will examine to what extent Transkribus's Scholarship Programme is supporting early career researchers (ECRs), students and those with limited funding. Although issues of accessing digital humanities (DH) platforms go beyond financial barriers: raising further issues of language, discrimination, hardware requirements and skill barriers, producing an unhealthy weighting toward Global North perspectives, funding schemes are clearly necessary to increase the diversity and variety of DH research. This presses the need for a social justice minded approaches, designing workflows to account for those often neglected in DH work and clarifying which groups are most in need of such free processing schemes. In building up this approach, this study performed a content analysis of approx. 100 free processing requests sent to Transkribus. These requests were aggregated and anonymised in accordance with GDPR.  Email responses from READ staff about the nature and future of the Scholarship Programme were also received. This presentation will address the following questions: what is the demographic make-up of those making use of the free processing schemes? What work has this schemed enable? Is the scheme being utilised by the intended groups? How can this scheme be extended to provide more equitable access to Transkribus and DH platforms more broadly?