Project facts

Duration: 01-03-2018 - 28-02-2020
Project coordinator: Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes (CNRS), Paris (FRANCE)
Project consortium: Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes (CNRS), Paris (FRANCE); Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Valencia (SPAIN); National Archives of the Czech Republic, Prague (CZECH REPUBLIC); A2iA SAS, Paris (FRANCE); Teklia SAS, Paris (FRANCE)
Funding bodies: JPI CH
Subject areas: Archives, Digital Heritage, Digitization, History, Libraries, Methods - Procedures, Objects, Tangible Heritage, Technologies - Scientific processes

Presentation

Manuscripts are among the most important witnesses to our European shared cultural heritage and, while being increasingly digitized and published in large digital archives and libraries, they represent a valuable part of the European Digital Heritage. Its exploration, understanding, and dissemination need new tools for promoting community engagement with, and use of, heritage. Indeed, the wealth of information conveyed by the text captured in these images remains largely inaccessible, whereas general users and researchers expect more and more to query handwritten resources in plain text like printed books and to get the answers in a meaningful environment that accompanies the users experience with semantically structured information and visualizations.

Capitalizing on the success of the JPI-Ch Heritage Plus funded HIMANIS project, HOME has associated Computer Science (UPVLC, A2iA, Telkia), Humanities (IRHT) and Cultural Heritage (NACR) institutions, plus a network of Research and cultural heritage institutions (ICARUS as Associate Partner) in order to not only produce technology to generate new, reserach-based knowledge from historical manuscripts, but also implement a user and researcher friendly environment for fostering a meaningful experience for scholarly research and discovery.

Impacts & Results

HOME has :

- Further developed searching approaches specifically designed for querying large sets of text images digitized from historical handwritten documents;

- Linked Digital Cultural and associated metadata (abstract, indexes and text editions) and authority data (indexes, gazetteers), which were disconnected from the digitized primary sources and stored in separate silos;

- Established a knowledge framework and a semantic information retrieval system, to understand the multilingual medieval sources;

- Presented, visualized and interpreted the sources on the History of Medieval Europe and;

- Leveraged meaningful discovery and research experience in a user-centered and ergonomic environment.

 

Banner: Detail of a miniature of Charlemagne in council, and Charlemagne honouring St Denis. Image taken from f. 183 of Chroniques de France ou de St Denis. Written in French. @Europeana