Name: 2ⁿᵈ Exchange Meeting of SCOOP: International Network for Automated Text Recognition of Historical Sources
Start: 2026-09-07T08:00:00+02:00
End: 2026-09-09T19:00:00+02:00
Location: University of Vienna

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

from Monday, September 7, 2026 (8:00 AM) to Wednesday, September 9, 2026 (7:00 PM)

Monday, September 7, 2026

8:00 AM Registration
Registration
8:00 AM - 9:00 AM

9:00 AM Plenary: Welcome
Welcome
9:00 AM - 9:15 AM
Room: Room 1
9:15 AM Keynote: Keynote
Keynote
9:15 AM - 10:30 AM
Room: Room 1
Contributions

9:15 AM The Transcription/Edition Distinction as a Foundation for Trustworthy Automatic Text Recognition - Thibault Clérice (ALMAnaCH, Inria)
10:30 AM Coffee break
Coffee break
10:30 AM - 11:00 AM
11:00 AM Working Group 1: WG1-1 - Technologies & Architectures
WG1-1 - Technologies & Architectures
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Room: Room 1
Contributions

11:00 AM Finetuning VLMs in a World of Zero-Shot Frontier Models: A Paradigm Shift toward Knowledge Distillation and Local Deployment - William Mattingly (Yale University)

11:20 AM AnandaSky - Colin Brisson (Ecolé pratique des hautes études)

11:40 AM Metatools & Technological Agnosticism - Andy Stauder (READ COOP)
12:30 PM Lunch
Lunch
12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
1:30 PM Working Group 4: Language Challenges I
Language Challenges I
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Room: Room 3
Contributions

1:30 PM Four Scripts, Five Languages, One Digitalization Challenge - Ana Mihaljević (Institute for the Croatian language)

1:40 PM Matchbox: Creating a Combined Recognition Model for Early Medieval Celtic Languages and Latin - Bernhard Bauer (University of Graz)

1:50 PM How hybrid HTR+VLM approaches are unlocking the processing of under-resourced, non-western languages - Baptiste Queuche (Calfa)

2:00 PM Using OCR to expand historical treebanks - Seth Kulick (Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania)

2:10 PM Which Languages Are In-Vocabulary? - Andrew Janco (Princeton University)

2:20 PM The language of Greek papyri? One millennium of writing and its complexity - Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello (University of Basel)
Working Group 1: Training as a continuous process
Training as a continuous process
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Room: Room 1
Contributions

1:30 PM Piloting HTR in the Library: Experiments and Groundwork - Doug Emery (University of Pennsylvania Libraries)

1:50 PM Multi-Model OCR Arbitration: High-Precision OCR for 19th Century Administrative Mass Sources - Wolfgang Göderle (University of Graz | University of Passau | MPI GEA) David Fleischhacker (University of Graz)

2:10 PM From PDF to mARkdown: A Scalable Arabic OCR Pipeline for expanding the OpenITI Corpus - Alicia González Martínez (Hamburg University)

2:30 PM Anagnostes - Towards a Transformer-based OCR System for Ancient Greek Papyri - Elena Chepel (University of Vienna) Anton Repushko (Independent Researcher)
Working Group 3: Transcription approaches I (Palaeography in focus)
Transcription approaches I (Palaeography in focus)
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Room: Room 2
Contributions

1:30 PM Computational Paleography through Automatic Text Recognition - Benjamin Kiessling (ALMAnaCH, Inria Paris)

1:50 PM Towards Geometry-Based Scribal Hand Analysis: A Word-Level Graphometric Framework for Arabic Manuscripts - Sajjad Nikfahm-Khubravan (Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, University of Maryland)

2:10 PM Leveraging HTR for Script Characterization: Toward a Unified Computational Framework for Palaeographical Analysis - Malamatenia Vlachou (IRHT/CNRS-ENPC)

2:30 PM Workflows and granularities: text, image, and what remains - Dominique Stutzmann (IRHT-CNRS / HU Berlin)
3:00 PM Coffee break
Coffee break
3:00 PM - 3:30 PM
3:30 PM Working Group 4: Language Challenges II
Language Challenges II
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Room: Room 3
Contributions

3:30 PM Dark Vellum, Dense Diacritics: Challenges in Training HTR Models for Medieval Icelandic - Katrín Lísa van der Linde Mikaelsdóttir (University of Iceland)

4:00 PM Impacts of Script Features on Text Recognition: Experiments with Greek and Arabic - Christine Roughan (Princeton University)

4:30 PM Syriac Manuscripts That Can Talk: Giving Voice to Under-Resourced Scripts in HTR - Ephrem Aboud Ishac (Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Working Group 1: Experimental approaches
Experimental approaches
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Room: Room 1
Contributions

3:30 PM Utilization of the Open WebUI platform in Arkindex - Michal Racyn (Masaryk University)

3:50 PM Document Layout Analysis for Glossed Medieval Manuscripts: Comparing Kraken 6 and YOLO26 - Tristan Repolusk (Department of Digital Humanities, University of Graz)

4:10 PM Finding our way through the National Archives: HTR for indexing a large corpus - Elise Wang (California State University, Fullerton)

4:30 PM Insights from an Unsound Experiment: Testing Kraken, TrOCR, and VLMs with an LLM Judge - Tobias Hodel (University of Bern)
Working Group 3: Transcription approaches II (Transcription decisions, their effect, and related terminology)
Transcription approaches II (Transcription decisions, their effect, and related terminology)
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Room: Room 2
Contributions

3:30 PM Otto Dei gram, rogat vram Clam. From facsimile and descriptive transcriptions to “quasi-diplomatic” and interpretative approaches in ATR/HTR - Jan Odstrčilík (Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences)

3:50 PM Lost in Transcription? Reconciling HTR Output with Old Czech Editorial Standards - Anna Michalcová (Czech Language Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences; Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences)

4:10 PM Reading Glagolitic in the Twenty-First Century: Between Philology, HTR, and AI - Ana Mihaljević (Institute for the Croatian language)

4:30 PM HTR of Normalized Latin Texts: Insights from Liturgical Manuscripts - Paweł Figurski (Polish Academy of Sciences)
5:00 PM Break
Break
5:00 PM - 5:15 PM
5:15 PM Keynote
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM
Room: Room 1
Contributions

5:15 PM New Epistemic Frontiers: LLMs for Linking Transcription, Editing, and Interpretation - Anna Dolganov (Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences) David Smith (Northeastern University)
6:30 PM Reception
Reception
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Tuesday, September 8, 2026
9:00 AM Working Group 6: Leveraging Outputs: Text Reuse, NLP, and More (talks)
Leveraging Outputs: Text Reuse, NLP, and More (talks)
9:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Room: Room 3
Contributions

9:00 AM Testing the Reuse Value of Pracalit Ground Truth for Bhujimol Manuscripts - Alexander O'Neill (Musashino University)

9:30 AM From Old Icelandic HTR Outputs to Normalised Texts through Seq2Seq Transformers - Nikola Krisztian Czindrity (University of Vienna)

10:00 AM Using OCR to expand a treebank of historical Yiddish: A Progress Report - Seth Kulick (Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania)
Working Group 1: Roundtable
Roundtable
9:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Room: Room 1
Working Group 2: Handwriting Classification I
Handwriting Classification I
9:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Room: Room 2
Contributions

9:00 AM From Handwriting Classification Errors to Paleographic Evidence: Graphic Compensation in Ancient Greek Documentary Hands - Asimina Paparrigopoulou (Democritus University of Thrace) Paraskevi Platanou (Athens University of Economics and Business, and Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Greece)

9:30 AM Classification of Armenian manuscripts without OCR/HTR preprocessing - Tara Andrews (University of Vienna)

10:00 AM Beyond the Heatmap: What Faithful Explanations Can Do for Handwriting Identification - Serena Ammirati (Università degli Studi Roma Tre) Paolo Merialdo (Roma Tre University)
10:30 AM Coffee Break
Coffee Break
10:30 AM - 11:00 AM

11:00 AM Working Group 4: Roundtable 🎤 - Language Challenges
Roundtable 🎤 - Language Challenges
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Room: Room 1
Working Group 6: Leveraging Outputs: Text Reuse, NLP, and More (demos)
Leveraging Outputs: Text Reuse, NLP, and More (demos)
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Room: Room 3
Contributions

11:00 AM New Ways to Transform and Explore Older Korean Texts: From ATR to Reading Texts to Agentic Retrieval in Mo文oNExplorer - Wayne de Fremery (Dominican University of California)

11:20 AM From Document Images to Research Catalogue - Andrew Janco (Princeton University)

11:40 AM Fichero and the Circuit Court Archive of Istmina: An AI Workflow App for Researchers - Daniel Tubb (Anthropology, University of New Brunswick, Canada)

12:00 PM Intertextuality as a Retrieval Task: Benchmarking Text Reuse in Classical and Medieval Latin - Martin Roček (Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences and Faculty of Arts, Charles University)
Working Group 2: Handwriting Classification II
Handwriting Classification II
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Room: Room 2
Contributions

11:00 AM Classifying Squeezes Again: Initial Results from an ICDAR Contest - Aaron Hershkowitz (The Institute for Advanced Study)

11:30 AM Communities of Practice: Capturing the Aspect of Late Medieval Handwriting - Sebastian Sobecki (University of Toronto) Sam Grieggs (Indiana University of Pennsylvania)

12:00 PM Script classification and alphabet identification - Giuseppe De Gregorio (Computer Vision Center - CVC - Barcelona)
12:30 PM Lunch
Lunch
12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
1:30 PM Working Group 5: Datasets and Institutions
Datasets and Institutions
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Room: Room 2
Contributions

1:30 PM Integrating HTR into Digital Library Workflows - Jessie Dummer (University of Pennsylvania Libraries)

1:50 PM Manuscriptorium Full-Text Module: Building a Digital-Edition Infrastructure - Michael Lužný (National Library of the Czech Republic)

2:10 PM Reviving the Legacy: How to Adapt the Latin Text Archive for the Age of AI - Tim Geelhaar (Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main)

2:30 PM HTR in the German Manuscript Centres: Current Status, Challenges, and Perspectives - Ursula Stampfer (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)
Working Group 6: Unconference
Unconference
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Room: Room 3
Working Group 3: Building ATR/HTR pipelines
Building ATR/HTR pipelines
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Room: Room 1
Contributions

1:30 PM The Pragmatics of ATR Pipelines: Structural Dilemmas in Designing Workflows for Historical Corpora - Michael Schonhardt (TU Darmstadt / Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainz)

1:50 PM Building an ATR pipeline for tabular data and script translation - Olaf Berg (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

2:10 PM Iterative HTR: A new pipeline for automatic text recognition of Arabic-script - Osama Eshera (University of Maryland)

2:30 PM Building an OCR Pipeline at the Austrian National Library - Johannes Knüchel (Austrian National Library)
3:00 PM Coffee Break
Coffee Break
3:00 PM - 3:30 PM

3:30 PM Working Groups working on conclusions
Working Groups working on conclusions
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
- **WG 1 [Room 1 = HS1]: HTR Technology Development **(coordinators: Tobias Hodel) - **WG 2 [Room 2 = SR5]: Document or Handwriting Classification** (coordinators: Maria Konstantinidou, John Pavlopoulos, Paraskevi Platanou) - **WG 3 [Room 3 = SR4]: Methodological Issues of HTR** (coordinators: Anna Michalcová and Jan Odstrčilík) - **WG 4 [Room 4 = SR3]: Language Challenges** (coordinators: Christine Roughan) - **WG 5 [Room 5 = HS2, second floor]: Datasets and Institutions **(coordinators: Gerda Heydemann, Maria Konstantinidou) - **WG 6 [Room 6 = HS3, third floor]: Leveraging Outputs: Text Reuse, NLP, and More** (coordinators: Tara Andrews, Martin Roček)

5:00 PM Short Break
Short Break
5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

5:15 PM Final Roundtable - Open data, open code, open minds in AI
Final Roundtable - Open data, open code, open minds in AI
5:15 PM - 6:45 PM

6:45 PM Conclusion of the public part
Conclusion of the public part
6:45 PM - 7:00 PM
Wednesday, September 9, 2026

9:00 AM Internal meeting of SCOOP
Internal meeting of SCOOP
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM