Machine Learning Meets Provenance Research: Recognising and Transcribing Handwritten Annotations in Auction Catalogues.

Provenance research studies the origin and ownership history of objects including the conditions under which a change in ownership took place. In order to reconstruct the provenance of objects, provenance researchers utilise sources such as archival records, literature and online databases as well a...

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Published in:International Journal of Humanities & Arts Computing: A Journal of Digital Humanities Vol. 19; no. 1; pp. 17 - 33
Main Author: Lang, Sabine
Format: Article
Published: Edinburgh University Press Mar2025
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Mar2025
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      pub: Edinburgh University Press
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        10.3366/ijhac.2025.0342
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        atl: Machine Learning Meets Provenance Research: Recognising and Transcribing Handwritten Annotations in Auction Catalogues.
      aug:
        au: Lang, Sabine
        affil: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
      su:
        Online databases
        Research personnel
        Machine learning
        ChatGPT
        Archival resources
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          Online databases
          Research personnel
          Machine learning
          ChatGPT
          Archival resources
      keyword:
        handwriting recognition
        handwriting transcription
        machine learning
        provenance research
      ab: Provenance research studies the origin and ownership history of objects including the conditions under which a change in ownership took place. In order to reconstruct the provenance of objects, provenance researchers utilise sources such as archival records, literature and online databases as well as examining the object itself. One essential online database for researchers is German Sales, which contains digitised auction catalogues from mostly German-speaking countries in the period from 1901 to 1945. Several catalogues contain handwritten annotations recording buyers, consignors and prices. However, in contrast to the printed text, the handwritten annotations are currently not searchable. To aid provenance researchers, it is imperative that the annotations be made machine-readable and searchable, which requires transcription, standardisation and enrichment of the handwritten notes. This article tests whether existing platforms, namely Transkribus, eScriptorium and ChatGPT, can be facilitated for the recognition and transcription of handwritten notes. While the experiments show the great potential of these methods, they also emphasise the need to train new models on these auction catalogues' data.
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    language: English
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      custom: Copyright of International Journal of Humanities & Arts Computing: A Journal of Digital Humanities is the property of Edinburgh University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
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