We analyzed historical and literary documents in Chinese to gain insights into research issues, and overview our studies which utilized four different sources of text materials in this paper. We investigated the history of concepts and transliterated words in China with the Database for the Study of Modern China Thought and Literature, which contains historical documents about China between 183...

The FDR/Pearl Harbor Project involves the enhancement of materials drawn from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Digital Archives, which includes a range of image, sound, video and textual data. The project is undertaking the encoding, annotation, and multi-modal linkage of a portion of the collection, and enhancement of a web-based interface that enables exploitation of state-of-theart meth...

We report on a newly available gazetteer of historical English place-names and describe how it was created from a recent digitisation of the Survey of English Place-Names, published by the English Place-Name Society (EPNS). The gazetteer resource is accessible via a number of routes, not currently as linked data but in formats that do provide connections between a number of different datasets. ...

This paper presents a scheme for generating paper texture of historical documents. A new entropy based segmentation algorithm is used to decompose the image of documents into the image of the paper background and the printing of the document. Statistical analysis allows filling in the gaps from the printing, yielding a blank sheet of paper with similar texture to the original document.

The increasing interest in archiving all of humankind’s cultural artifacts has resulted in the digitization of millions of books, and soon a significant fraction of the world’s books will be online. Most of the data in historical manuscripts is text, but there is also a significant fraction devoted to images. This fact has driven much of the recent increase in interest in query-by-content syste...

This paper reviews current discussion of the issue of just what is lost when a language dies. Special reference is made to the current situation in Laos, a country renowned for its considerable cultural and linguistic diversity. It focuses on the historical, anthropological and ecological knowledge that a language can encode, and the social and cultural consequences of the loss of such traditio...

The objective of our work is to enable the reading of fragile scrolled historical parchments without the need to physically unravel them, thus providing valuable information to a wide range of scholarly disciplines. This problem has not been investigated by the computer vision community properly yet due to the need for parchment scanning technology: standard x-ray machinery is not sufficient as...

The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) has acquired a historical collection of documents, released by the Food and Drug Administration, specifying the Notices of Judgment (NJs) against manufacturers of adulterated or misbranded food, drugs and cosmetics. These documents, consisting of 70,000+ pages containing more than 65,000 NJs, are to be preserved and made accessible over the long term ...

Transcription of handwritten words in historical documents is still a difficult task. When processing huge amount of pages, document centered approaches are limited by the trade-off between automatic recognition errors and the tedious aspect of human user annotation work. In this article, we investigate the use of inter page dependencies to overcome those limitations. For this, we propose a new...

Many national archives or libraries keep large amount of historical handwritten documents. One problem that many archivists are facing is the sipping of ink through the pages of certain double-sided handwritten documents after long periods of storage. The result is that the handwritten characters from the reverse side appear as noise on the front side and even interfere with the front side char...