There have been numerous efforts recently to digitize previously published content and preserving born-digital content leading to the widespread growth of large text repositories. Web archives are such continuously growing text collections which contain versions of documents spanning over long time periods. Web archives present many opportunities for historical, cultural and political analyses....

The ever growing number of textual historical collections calls for methods that can meaningfully connect and explore these. Different collections offer different perspectives, expressing views at the time of writing or even a subjective view of the author. We propose to connect heterogeneous digital collections through temporal references found in documents as well as their textual content. We...

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) of historical documents is becoming more common at national libraries and archives. HSI is useful for many tasks related to document conservation and management as it provides detailed quantitative measurements of the spectral reflectance of the document that is not limited to the visible spectrum. In this paper, we focus on how to use the invisible spectra, most not...

Transcribing documents from the printing press era, a challenge in its own right, is more complicated when documents interleave multiple languages—a common feature of 16th century texts. Additionally, many of these documents precede consistent orthographic conventions, making the task even harder. We extend the state-of-the-art historical OCR model of Berg-Kirkpatrick et al. (2013) to handle wo...

In this paper we present an algorithm for thresholding images of historical documents. The main objective is to generate high quality monochromatic images in order to make them easily accessible through the Internet. Our new algorithm is based on two definitions of entropy: Shannon’s classical concept and a variation called Tsallis entropy. For historical documents, our method proved to be more...

In this paper, we investigate the use of Convolutional Neural Networks for counting the number of records in historical handwritten documents. With this work we demonstrate that training the networks only with synthetic images allows us to perform a near perfect evaluation of the number of records printed on historical documents. The experiments have been performed on a benchmark dataset compos...