Biggs Classics PhD student Ana Ribeiro, using funds provided by the department and its donors, attended the Handwritten Text Recognition Winter School at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
In Vienna, I attended the Handwritten Text Recognition Winter School, continuing my work with the Byzantine Greek group I joined last summer. We trained a model in Transkribus, a platform for transcribing documents, using 66 pages of the manuscript Paris. gr. 1382. Significant progress was made compared to the previous edition, as the Character Error Rate (CER) dropped from 20% to 11%. Importantly, our model now successfully recognizes diacritics as well as abbreviations and ligatures that other models do not.
Additionally, I had the opportunity to discuss previous and future projects with two leading scholars on ancient music: Dr. Stefan Hagel and Dr. Christos Terzis. I was also able to play the plagiaulos that Dr. Terzis reconstructed!
I am grateful to the department for supporting and funding this amazing opportunity!
