HANDS-ON SESSION MONK
PRIZE PAPERS & HANDWRITING RECOGNITION
HANDS-ON SESSION MONK POSTHUMUS NIJMWEGEN
Andreas Weber (UT) / Marti Huetink (Brill) / Lambert Schomaker (RUG)
In this hands-on session we will work with the so-called 'interrogations' of the digitized Prize papers. The Prize papers are a vast and valuable collection of judicial documents, private and official letters, shipping lists, and ledgers covering the period between 1652 and 1815. The 'interrogations' provide detailed information on ships, crew members, and cargo. Our session today shows how handwriting recognition services such as MONK can help to make collection such as the digitized Prize papers searchable.
1. Choose your login
2. Login at MONK
3. Exercise I - (try to transcribe 10 or more lines)
Aim of this exercise is to get acquainted with MONK's word labelling mechanism. This helps to build an index and s search engine for a collection of digitized handwritten documents. I'll explain on the main screen how the labelling works.
Some basic transcription rules:
- Don't label what you can't read!
- Label what you see, even if the spelling is wrong!
- If there are two words in the grey box use an underscore: this_ship
- Sometimes the first line will be invisible. If that is the case jump to the next line.
Here is a short recap how the labelling works:
- In order to start with this excercise please click on the link as it is provided below. Each user name has its own link.
- Click on one of the yellow [R] buttons.
- This brings you to the word labelling interface.
- Click with the left mouse button on the white space in front of a word. MONK will start searching for word zones (grey boxes)
- Find the right word zone and then click on the word.
- Fill in or correct the label.
- Push save label and continue.
- In order to speed up the labelling process you can keep the CTRL button pressed on the keyboard, and then use the mouse to segment words by adding multiple bars. Don't forget to place the last bar after the last word in a line. Basically you can't do anything wrong, so just try and play with it.
- For Apple users: for you the CTRL button option won't work, I'll show on screen how it works for you.
prize26: tbd
prize27: tbd
prize28: tbd
prize29: tbd
prize30: tbd
4. Exercise II: Train with hitlists
MONK actively learns from user input. As soon as a word has been labeled several times, MONK starts looking for similarly looking word shapes. Words in green boxes have been labelled already. Words in red boxes can be labelled by you. If you spot other words in red boxes you can also label them.
Example: Account
prize01: Ammunition and anchor
prize02: answereth and attempted
prize03: Britannick and Board
prize10: Instruments and James
prize17: examinant and destroyed
prize26:
prize27:
prize28:
prize29:
prize30:
If you need additional examples check out one of these: https://monk.hpc.rug.nl/cgi-bin/monkweb?cmd=TrainedWords&annot=all&sortopt=sorted_name&sortorder=normal&trainedwordmethod=Workshop&db=99900001&dispmode=quick&prefix=&begin=0