The aim of Wissenschaftslehre Wiki Project is to produce an open-access, digital collaborative edition in Latin script of a 2000-page 19th century German text originally written in Fraktur. This will be done on a Wiki-platform integrating an OCR engine based on open source tools for 19th century German Fraktur. The text involved is Bernard Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre, first published in 1837. We work in two steps. At Step 1 we develop a user-friendly open source Fraktur (Blackletter) OCR application suitable for integration on a collaboratory for editorial projects involving texts written in Fraktur. At Step 2 we setup the collaboratory and possibly crowdsource the work within the community of Bolzano scholars, and possibly beyond. This project has similar aims to (parts of!) the IMPACT project, but on a far smaller scale and done with open source software. It has also similarities with the aims of Wikisource.de. People involved Arianna Betti (Axiom Group, VU University)(coordination) Hein van den Berg (Axiom Group, VU University) Constantijn Sikkel (VU University, programmer; background in Theology) Iris Loeb (Axiom Group, VU University)(only up to 2012) Johan Blok (Associate member Axiom Group/Groningen University) Stefan Roski (Axiom Group, VU University) Paul Huygen (IT-service, VU University) [programmer] Mariya Koleva (Axiom Group, VU University)[computational linguist] State of affairs We did preliminary work on Step 1. Challenges and next steps at Step 1: developing a user-friendly software application based on Tesseract/OCRopus. For this we are in contact with Mark Hedges' group of Centre for e-Research at King's College who have worked on Tesseract/OCRopus but not on the Fraktur module yet. |