Saturday May 30 (9:00 AM – 1:00 PM) Federico Boschetti of the Cnr-Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” (CNR-ILC) will give a lecture titled “Reading the past with AI: eScriptorium and Transkribus” at the nineth edition of the Summer School “Digital Tools for Humanists”, organised by the University of Pisa, under the direction of the “Laboratorio di Cultura Digitale” (Laboratory for Digital Culture).
This lecture will focus on automatic text recognition (ATR) software, providing participants with a theoretical basis, key terminology, contexts of use and an overview of current functionalities. The session will include a detailed introduction to the two main ATR platforms: eScriptorium and Transkribus.
In the practical part of the workshop, participants will work in groups on both platforms using real handwritten materials. Practical exercises will cover software use in the cloud, uploading images, applying models and the entire workflow required for transcribing manuscript documents.
“Digital tools for Humanists Summer School 2026” will be held in Pisa from May 25 to May 30 2026, both in presence and online via Microsoft Teams. The School is addressing all those interested in getting basic and working knowledge of some of the digital tools available today to scholars in many different fields of the Humanities. The edition of 2026 will focus on basic tools for Natural Language Processing (NLP), Digital Philology, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and use of AI in those fields.
The School is under the auspices of CLARIN-IT, the Italian node of CLARIN, the ERIC Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure, aiming to make digital language resources available to scholars, researchers, students and citizen-scientists from all disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, through single sign-on access. The School is also under the auspices of AIUCD, the Italian Association for Digital Humanities and Culture, AIPH, the Italian Association of Public History and of CISPH, the Interuniversity Centre for Research and Development of Public History.