BUSHMAN PAINTINGS

Learning to Read Bushman: Automatic Handwriting Recognition for Bushman Texts

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection contains notebooks that document the tradition, language and culture of the Bushman people who lived in South Africa in the late 19th century. Transcriptions of these notebooks would allow for the provision of services such as textbased search and text-to-speech. However, these notebooks are currently only available in the form of digital scans and the manual crea...

Learning to Read Bushman

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection contains notebooks that document Bushman stories and culture and are available as digital scans [1]. Converting these images to text, through a process known as transcription, would allow for the text which appears in the notebooks to be searched, indexed and compared. However, automatic transcription of Bushman texts is difficult due to the diacritics that span m...

Creating a Handwriting Recognition Corpus for Bushman Languages

Handwriting recognition systems rely on the existence of a corpus for training recognition models and evaluating accuracy. Creating a handwriting recognition corpus for the Bushman languages of southern Africa is difficult due to the complexities of the script used to represent them and the fact that this script cannot be represented using Unicode. To solve this problem, a semi-automatic Web-ba...

Looking Through Paintings

Protein structure paintings.

When artist Steve Miller met Nobel Laureate Rod MacKinnon at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, MacKinnon was investigating protein structures: specifically, how potassium ions move across cell membranes. Miller became fascinated with the visual tools MacKinnon used to grapple with the problem: 3D computer models of proteins, graphical equations and diagrams in the scientist’s notebook...