Roshan Institute Awarded NEH Grant for Improving Manuscript HTR

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The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park (Roshan Institute-UMD) a Level III Digital Humanities Advancement Grant in the amount of $324,571 for the “Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora: Improving Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script Manuscripts” project. Matthew Thomas Miller—Assistant Professor of Persian Literature at Roshan Institute-UMD and Director of the Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities—will serve as the Principal Investigator of this project, with David Smith—Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University—serving as the co-Principal Investigator.

This project will greatly advance the field of handwritten text recognition (i.e., optical character recognition for manuscripts) by producing a “distantly supervised” system capable of automatically producing large amounts of training data.

For more information on the ACDC project and how it fits in with The Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities and the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative’s other projects, please see PI Miller’s Twitter thread here and the official NEH announcement.