Gallic(orpor)a

Our initiative aims at designing a controlled vocabulary for the description of the layout of textual sources: SegmOnto. Following a more physical approach rather than a strictly semantic one, it is designed as a pragmatic and generic typology, coping with most of the Western historical documents rather than answering specific needs. The harmonisation of the layout description has a double objective: on the one hand it facilitates the mutualisation of annotated data and therefore the training of better models for page segmentation (a crucial preliminary step for text recognition), on the other hand it allows the development of a shared post-processing workflow and pipeline for the transformation of ALTO or PAGE files into DH standard formats, which preserves as much as possible the link between the extracted information and the digital facsimile. To demonstrate the capacity of SegmOnto to answer both these objectives, we aggregate data from multiple projects to train a layout analysis model, and we propose a prototype of a generic pipeline for converting ALTO-XMLs into XML-TEI.

Depuis quelques années, la philologie computationnelle a ouvert la voie à de nouvelles approches pour l'étude des textes médiévaux et modernes. Ces approches nécessitent cependant des données en grande quantité que l'on ne peut obtenir qu'en extrayant les textes à partir des fac-similés numériques. Pour ce faire, la recherche a besoin d'outils efficaces, s'appuyant sur des guides qui garantissent une interopérabilité maximale entre les différents états d'une langue (ancien français, moyen français, etc.) et les différents types de textes (manuscrits, imprimés, etc.). Cet article se concentre sur la production imprimée du XVIe siècle, en langue française et en caractères gothiques, en prenant pour cas d'étude un corpus romand. Nous proposons deux modèles qui améliorent l'état de l'art actuel : l'un pour l'analyse de la mise en page et l'autre pour l'OCR. Ces modèles s'appuient sur un vocabulaire contrôlé pour la description des pages et sur un guide de transcription pour les textes en gothique.

Cultural heritage institutions today aim to digitise their collections of prints and manuscripts (Bermès 2020) and are generating more and more digital images (Gray 2009). To enrich these images, many institutions work with standardised formats such as IIIF, preserving as much of the source’s information as possible. To take full advantage of textual documents, an image alone is not enough. Thanks to automatic text recognition technology, it is now possible to extract images’ content on a large scale. The TEI seems to provide the perfect format to capture both an image’s formal and textual data (Janès et al. 2021). However, this poses a problem. To ensure compatibility with a range of use cases, TEI XML files must guarantee IIIF or RDF exports and therefore must be based on strict data structures that can be automated. But a rigid structure contradicts the basic principles of philology, which require maximum flexibility to cope with various situations. The solution proposed by the Gallic(orpor)a project attempted to deal with such a contradiction, focusing on French historical documents produced between the 15th and the 18th c. It aims to enrich the digital facsimiles distributed by the French National Library (BnF).

The forefront of research on textual documents (may they be manuscripts and prints) is slowly moving from text recognition to automatic encoding. Quickly transforming images into XML-TEI documents is therefore the next important obstacle that needs to be tackled to offer enhanced mining options to digital libraries users.

Recommendations for the annotation of classical French: tokenisation, lemmatisation, part-of-speech tagging, morphology.