Objective This project aims to provide the first viable and accurate solution for digitising early printed books in Latin using Optical Character Recognition. Our basic OCR package will be free and open-source, in order to ensure affordability, longevity, and openness for improvement (three failures of our commercial competitors). Our Company Limited by Guarantee will market costumisation, training, support, and further development tailored to specific collections of books (the standard failure of open-source solutions). Customisation services are essential in our market. Early printed Latin cannot be successfully digitised using standard OCR packages (whether open-source or commercial): these currently have an accuracy of no more than 15%. We plan to modify the open-source Tesseract engine, by training it to account for Latin grammar and early typography: this will increase its accuracy of recognition to about 80%. Customisation tailored to specific collections of books will further improve accuracy to about 95% to 98%. Our company will address the needs of libraries, digital publishers, researchers, learned societies, and private collectors of early books. Our commercialisation plan is modelled on that of other successful businesses based on open-source software.The demand for Latin OCR is strong, as publishers and libraries switch to digital publication and storage. From the invention of printing in the Renaissance until well into the 19th century, Latin was the European language of every intellectual discourse: the natural sciences, mathematics, philosophy, theology, law, literary criticism, geography, archaeology, music, medicine. The subsequent shift to using the vernacular languages was a seismic event. We are now experiencing a revolution of similar proportions: the advent of digital publication is bringing opportunities and risks whose outlines are still unclear. This project aims to offer a solid technical bridge between the digital future and the Latin past. Fields of science social sciencespolitical sciencespolitical transitionsrevolutionshumanitieslanguages and literatureliterature studiesliterary theoryliterary criticismhumanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeologysocial scienceslawhumanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionphilosophy Programme(s) H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme Topic(s) ERC-PoC-2014 - ERC Proof of Concept Grant Call for proposal ERC-2014-PoC See other projects for this call Funding Scheme ERC-POC - Proof of Concept Grant Coordinator UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM Net EU contribution € 148 178,00 Address Stockton road the palatine centre DH1 3LE Durham United Kingdom See on map Region North East (England) Tees Valley and Durham Durham CC Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Participation in EU R&I programmes Opens in new window HORIZON collaboration network Opens in new window Other funding € 0,00 Beneficiaries (1) Sort alphabetically Sort by Net EU contribution Expand all Collapse all UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM United Kingdom Net EU contribution € 148 178,00 Address Stockton road the palatine centre DH1 3LE Durham See on map Region North East (England) Tees Valley and Durham Durham CC Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Participation in EU R&I programmes Opens in new window HORIZON collaboration network Opens in new window Other funding € 0,00
