Abstract

Information technology has revolutionised research and scholarly communities. However, these communities have a legacy of written materials which need to be preserved and distributed, through digitisation and network publication. We are seeing the first phase of this work in the large-scale book-scanning efforts of Google and others. These scanning efforts principally target the more well-known and widespread published texts.

Many researchers, however, are also interested in digital access to works that are rare and of very specialised interest. For researchers in chemistry or medicine, these may be notebooks of experimenters in their field. For comparative linguists, digitised translations of the same book in a thousand languages would be of great benefit. For historians, access to digitised medieval manuscripts can open new understandings of that world.

In this session, we would like to bring together people working on digitising written material, whether manuscript or printed, and presenting it to a world-wide research audience. We are keen to share ideas about:

• Accessing original materials
• Digitisation hardware
• Best practice in document scanning
• OCR for manuscript and problem fonts, and
• Marking up materials for search, data-mining, and presentation.

While the proposers' research area is in the humanities, we are keen to hear from those in other areas, such as the hard sciences, who are addressing the problem of incorporating legacy materials from the pre-digital era into the new information infrastructure. We would like this meeting to bring together people facing digitisation issues, to:

• Make others aware of similar projects
• Pass on solutions found to common problems
• Identify shared infrastructure needs potentially leading to joint grant applications.

About the speaker

Elzbieta Majocha is a research associate in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia (UWA), where she has worked on eResearch projects in the Humanities for two years now. These include: eLearning/Teaching MA course development in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, collaborative research on an ARC Linkage project and building a virtual research organisation for the ARC Research Network NEER (Network for Early European Research). Before coming to UWA in 2006, she completed her PhD in historical linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.