Speaker
Description
The digitization of the Dictionary of the Croatian redaction of Church Slavonic, carried out within the DigiSTIN project, has presented us with a particular challenge: how to efficiently OCR and HTR materials that combine multiple languages and writing systems. The dictionary covers Croatian Church Slavonic, Croatian, English, Latin, and Greek, and uses Latin, Greek, Glagolitic, and Old Cyrillic scripts. While the more recent volumes are available in digital form, the older volumes exist only in print, making them an ideal testing ground for different approaches to automatic text recognition. The complexity of the project is further increased by the dictionary's underlying corpus: several million paper slips written in more than twenty different handwrittings, containing texts in Latin, Greek, and Old Cyrillic. This manuscript material is itself currently undergoing digitization.
In this short talk, we will share our experience of developing the dictionary's online portal and digitizing both its printed and manuscript materials. Particular attention will be given to the advantages and limitations of OCR, HTR, custom-trained models, and LLM-based approaches when working with multilingual and multiscript historical materials.