Conversations about AI are often future focused, but these emerging technologies can also help us bring the past to life.

Today we find out how AI has been used in Beyond 2022, a flagship research project led by Trinity College Dublin which will digitally recreate seven centuries of historical records of the Public Record Office of Ireland destroyed by fire at Dublin’s Four Courts at the beginning of the Irish Civil War.

Joining us on ADAPT Radio to tell us more are Senior Researcher at the Virtual Treasury of Ireland of Trinity College Dublin, Dr. David Brown and Managing Director of Transkribus developer Read-Coop, Andy Stauder.

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

01:08 What is Beyond 2022?
02:55 How the technology of Transkribus works
05:33 Processing data for historians
07:40 How AI can decipher handwriting
11:42 Recovering and digitising lost records and documents
15:35 Transkribus In Use
17:34 Using Chat GPT and other large language models to reverse cultural loss
20:27 Preventing bias in AI processing
24:17 Other potential applications of this technology
26:54 Futureproofing data accessibility

GUEST DETAILS

Dr David Brown is Senior Researcher at the Virtual Treasury of Ireland, a project based at Trinity College Dublin that aims to recreate a digital model of the Public Record Office of Ireland with its contents, destroyed in 1922. Starting in 2018, the Virtual Treasury of Ireland has developed a suite of deep-learning ‘models’, perfectly curated transcriptions, to train an AI system to read digital images of historical sources relating to Ireland and convert these into searchable text files. The automatic conversion of handwritten historical documents into searchable text is the latest major step in the digitisation of our written cultural heritage.

Website: https://virtualtreasury.ie/

Andy Stauder studied Translation Studies (German, Ital., Engl., Russ.; two Bachelor's, one Master's and one PhD degree) in Innsbruck, as well as Linguistics (Master's), Philosophy (Bachelor's) and Computer Science (not completed). His dissertation topic and research focus was the measurement of translation quality with combined machine- and human-based methods. In addition to his studies, he worked as a translator, IT manager and project collaborator in academic and EU-funded research projects and took over the technical management of the University of Innsbruck's subsidiary, innsbruck university innovations, in 2012, its management in 2016 and became managing director of READ-COOP SCE, the provider of the software Transkribus, in 2019.

Website: www.transkribus.org
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-stauder-22a2b191/

MORE INFORMATION

Adapt Radio is produced by DustPod.io for the Adapt Centre
For more information about ADAPT visit www.adaptcentre.ie

QUOTES

I think it shows how far you can go with AI because we can't read it. So we're looking at this and going well, maybe we can verify the text and check any mistakes and so on. Actually, we can't read the stuff at all. So the AI is actually doing an amazing job. - David Brown

You can search for, say, your family name, and you'll see your family name coming up on an old handwritten document from 500 years ago. People find this really, really interesting and engaging and an awful lot of fun. - David Brown

Everybody knows Chat GPT at this point, the GPT model that's at the base of this is also transformer based. What the language models can do now is interact in a more natural way with the user. So you can ask the document itself what it contains. They are some new avenues that we are pursuing, currently. - Andy Stauder

KEYWORDS
#ai #handwriting #language #Transkribus #history