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

Sep 7, 2026, 8:00 AM → Sep 9, 2026, 7:00 PM Europe/Vienna

University of Vienna

2^nd Exchange Meeting, Vienna, September 7-9. 2026 

SCOOP (Source Codes of the Past) is an international network dedicated to the automatic transcription and analysis of handwritten historical sources. It brings together people from very different corners of the scholarly world: historians, philologists, and palaeographers, archivists and librarians; computer scientists and machine learning researchers; software engineers asf. What unites them is a shared challenge: how to use automatic/handwritten text recognition (ATR/HTR) to unlock the vast written heritage of the past, and how to do it well. (Read more about SCOOP.)

After a first smaller meeting at Princeton in June of 2025 (for more information see https://fsp-text-edition-blog.univie.ac.at/?p=128), the second SCOOP Exchange Meeting is taking place in Vienna on 7–9 September 2026 hosted by the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Faculty for Cultural Historical Studies at the University of Vienna.

Over three days, it will bring together around a hundred members of the network for keynotes, parallel working group sessions, round tables, demonstrations, and open discussion formats, along with: as well as an internal working day devoted to the future of SCOOP:

September 7–8: Part of the conference open to registered external visitors

September 9: A dedicated internal working session for SCOOP members

September 10 (Associated Event): The OCR/HTR Workshop for Under-represented and Under-resourced Languages organized by Alíz Horváth - If you wish to join or present, please contact Alíz Horváth (HorvathA@ceu.edu).

Mon, September 7

9:00 AM → 10:00 AM Registration

10:00 AM → 10:15 AM Plenary: Welcome

10:15 AM → 11:30 AM Keynote

10:15 AM The Transcription/Edition Distinction as a Foundation for Trustworthy Automatic Text Recognition

Speaker: Thibault Clérice

11:30 AM → 12:00 PM Coffee break

12:00 PM → 1:30 PM Working Group 1: WG1-1 - Technologies & Architectures

12:00 PM Large Scale Approaches: Party

Speaker: Benjamin Kiessling (ALMAnaCH, Inria)

12:20 PM VLM Input – Fine-tuning VLMS

Speaker: William Mattingly

12:40 PM AnandaSky

Speaker: Colin Brisson (EPHE Paris)

1:00 PM Metatools & Technological Agnosticism

Speaker: Andy Stauder (READ COOP)

1:30 PM → 2:30 PM Lunch

2:30 PM → 4:00 PM Working Group 4: Language Challenges I

2:30 PM Four Scripts, Five Languages, One Digitalization Challenge

Speaker: Ana Mihaljević (Institute for the Croatian language)

2:50 PM Matchbox: creating a combined recognition model for early medieval Celtic languages and Latin

Speaker: Bernhard Bauer

3:10 PM Promising results for under-resourced languages : use cases on Arabic, Greek and Chinese

Speaker: Baptiste Queuche

3:30 PM Using ATR of Yiddish to study language change

Speaker: Seth Kulick

2:30 PM → 4:00 PM Working Group 1: Training as a continuous process

2:30 PM Piloting HTR in the Library: Experiments and Groundwork

Speaker: Doug Emery (UPenn)

2:50 PM Multi-Model OCR Arbitration: High-Precision OCR for 19th Century Administrative Mass Sources

Speaker: Wolfgang Goederle (Graz/Passau)

3:10 PM From PDF to mARkdown: A Scalable Arabic OCR Pipeline for expanding the OpenITI Corpus

Speaker: Alicia González Martínez (Universität Hamburg)

3:30 PM Anagnostes - Towards a Transformer-based OCR System for Ancient Greek Papyri

Speakers: Anton Repushko, Elena Chepel (University of Vienna)

2:30 PM → 4:00 PM Working Group 3: Transcription approaches I (Palaeography in focus)

2:30 PM Computational Paleography through Automatic Text Recognition

Speaker: Benjamin Kiessling (ALMAnaCH, Inria)

3:00 PM Towards Geometry-Based Scribal Hand Analysis: A Word-Level Graphometric Framework for Arabic Manuscripts

Speaker: Sajjad Nikfahm-Khubravan (Roshan Institute for Persian Studies)

3:30 PM Leveraging HTR corpora for morphological and metrological paleographical analysis

Speaker: Malamatenia Vlachou (IRHT/LIGM IPParis)

4:00 PM → 4:30 PM Coffee break

4:30 PM → 6:00 PM Working Group 4: Language Challenges II

4:30 PM Dark Vellum, Dense Diacritics: Challenges in Training HTR Models for Medieval Icelandic

Speaker: Katrín Lísa van der Linde Mikaelsdóttir

4:50 PM Impacts of Script Features on Text Recognition: Experiments with Greek and Arabic

Speaker: Christine Roughan

5:10 PM Syriac Manuscripts That Can Talk: Giving Voice to Under-Resourced Scripts in HTR

Speaker: Ephrem Ishac

4:30 PM → 6:00 PM Working Group 1: Experimental approaches

4:30 PM Utilization of the Open WebUI platform in Arkindex

Speaker: Michal Racyn (Masaryk University)

4:50 PM Comparing HTR engines with Polyscriptor

Speaker: Achim Rabus

5:10 PM Fichero and the Circuit Court Archive of Istmina: An AI Workflow App for Researchers

Speaker: Daniel Tubb

5:30 PM Document Layout Analysis for Glossed Medieval Manuscripts: Comparing Kraken 6 and YOLO26

Speaker: Tristan Repolusk (University of Graz)

4:30 PM → 6:00 PM Working Group 3: Transcription approaches II (Transcription decisions, their effect, and related terminology)

4:30 PM Otto Dei gram, rogat vram Clam. From facsimile and descriptive transcriptions to “quasi-diplomatic” and interpretative approaches in ATR/HTR

Speaker: Jan Odstrčilík (Institut für Mittelalterforschung, ÖAW)

4:50 PM Lost in Transcription? Reconciling HTR Output with Old Czech Editorial Standards

Speaker: Anna Michalcová (Czech Academy of Sciences / IMAFO, ÖAW)

5:10 PM HTR of Normalized Latin Texts: Insights from Liturgical Manuscripts

Speaker: Paweł Figurski (Polish Academy of Sciences)

5:30 PM Reading Glagolitic in the Twenty-First Century: Between Philology, HTR, and AI

Speaker: Ana Mihaljević (Institute for the Croatian language)

6:00 PM → 6:15 PM Break

6:15 PM → 7:30 PM Keynote

6:15 PM New Epistemic Frontiers: LLMs for Linking Transcription, Editing, and Interpretation

Speakers: Anna Dolganov, David Smith (Northwestern)

7:30 PM → 9:00 PM Reception

Tue, September 8

10:00 AM → 11:30 AM Working Group 5: Datasets and Institutions

10:00 AM Pipelines and Workflows

Speaker: Jessie Dummer

10:20 AM Manuscriptorium Full-Text Module – The newest component of the Manuscriptorium digital library

Speaker: Michael Lužný

10:40 AM How do you revive a legacy dataset?

Speaker: Tim Geelhaar

11:00 AM The current status of the field of HTR within the German manuscript centres

Speaker: Ursula Stampfer

10:00 AM → 11:30 AM Working Group 6: Leveraging Outputs: Text Reuse, NLP, and More (talks)

10:00 AM Testing the Reuse Value of Pracalit Ground Truth for Bhujimol Manuscripts

Speaker: Alexander O'Neill

10:30 AM From Old Icelandic HTR Outputs to Normalised Texts through Seq2Seq Transformers

Speaker: Nikola Krisztian Czindrity

11:00 AM New Ways to Transform and Explore Older Korean Texts: From ATR to Reading Texts to Agentic Retrieval in Mo文oNExplorer

Speaker: Seth Kulick

10:00 AM → 11:30 AM Working Group 1: Roundtable

11:30 AM → 12:00 PM Coffee Break

12:00 PM → 1:30 PM Working Group 4: Roundtable 🎤 - Language Challenges

12:00 PM → 1:30 PM Working Group 6: Leveraging Outputs: Text Reuse, NLP, and More (demos)

12:00 PM New Ways to Transform and Explore Older Korean Texts: From ATR to Reading Texts to Agentic Retrieval in Mo文oNExplorer

Speaker: Wayne de Fremery

12:30 PM From Document Images to Research Catalogue

Speaker: Andrew Janco

1:00 PM TBD

Speaker: Martin Roček

12:00 PM → 1:30 PM Working Group 2: Handwriting Classification I

12:00 PM Classifying Squeezes Again: Initial Results from an ICDAR Contest

Speaker: Aaron Hershkowitz

12:30 PM Communities of Practice: Capturing the Aspect of Late Medieval Handwriting

Speakers: Sam Grieggs, Sebastian Sobecki

1:00 PM Script classification and alphabet identification

Speaker: Giuseppe de Gregorio

1:30 PM → 2:30 PM Lunch

2:30 PM → 4:00 PM Working Group 6: Unconference

2:30 PM → 4:00 PM Working Group 2: Handwriting Classification II

2:30 PM [TBD - Handwriting classification]

Speakers: Asimina Paparrigopoulou, Paraskevi (Vivian) Platanou

3:00 PM Classification of Armenian manuscripts without OCR/HTR preprocessing

Speaker: Tara Andrews

3:30 PM [TBD - Explainability]

Speaker: Serena Ammirati

2:30 PM → 4:00 PM Working Group 3: Building ATR/HTR pipelines

2:30 PM The Pragmatics of ATR Pipelines: Structural Dilemmas in Designing Workflows for Historical Corpora

Speaker: Michael Schonhardt (Univ. Freiburg)

2:50 PM Building an ATR pipeline for tabular data and script translation

Speaker: Olaf Berg (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, AI:RUB, ERC-LOOP)

3:10 PM Iterative HTR: A new pipeline for automatic text recognition of Arabic-script

Speaker: Osama Eshera (University of Maryland)

3:30 PM Developing a pipeline for OCR at the Austrian National Library

Speaker: Johannes Knüchel (Austrian National Library)

4:00 PM → 4:30 PM Coffee Break

4:30 PM → 6:00 PM Working Groups working on conclusions

6:00 PM → 6:15 PM Short Break

6:15 PM → 7:45 PM Final Roundtable - Open data, open code, open minds in AI

7:45 PM → 8:00 PM Conclusion of the public part

Wed, September 9

10:00 AM → 6:05 PM Internal meeting of SCOOP