2ⁿᵈ Exchange Meeting of SCOOP: International Network for Automated Text Recognition of Historical Sources

Session

Keynote

Sep 7, 2026, 9:15 AM

University of Vienna

51. The Transcription/Edition Distinction as a Foundation for Trustworthy Automatic Text Recognition

Thibault Clérice (ALMAnaCH, Inria)

9/7/26, 9:15 AM

Automatic Text Recognition (ATR) has made manuscript scholarship scalable, but it also intro- duces profound epistemic challenges stemming from the conflation of transcription (the reporting of the visible source text) and edition (the act of scholarly interpretation). We argue that some of the current ATR practices may produce silent forgeries—plausible yet undocumented inferences that...

53. New Epistemic Frontiers: LLMs for Linking Transcription, Editing, and Interpretation

Anna Dolganov (Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences), David Smith (Northeastern University)

9/7/26, 5:15 PM

Generative AI has proved itself on many tasks where we can easily evaluate its performance, from transcribing modern documents and speech to linguistic annotation to mathematical proofs. To make progress on deeper research tasks in the humanities, new benchmarks and new methods of model interpretability should be developed. We present our work on the Apollo project for developing large models...