TY - GEN
T1 - Extracting meaningful data from decomposing bodies
AU - Langmead, Alison
AU - Rodriguez, Paul
AU - Satheesan, Sandeep Puthanveetil
AU - Craig, Alan
N1 - Funding Information:
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers ACI-1053575
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).
Copyright:
Copyright 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/7/9
Y1 - 2017/7/9
N2 - We present Decomposing Bodies, a digital humanities project that examines the late-19th-century system of anthropometrical measurement introduced in France by Alphonse Bertillon. "Bertillonnage," as this system is commonly known, was the first measurementbased, state-controlled system used for criminal identification. Currently, researchers resort to the tedious manual transcription in order to study the data on these cards in bulk. Here, we propose an end-To-end system for extracting handwritten text and numbers from scanned Bertillon cards in a semi-Automated fashion and also the ability to browse through the original data and generated metadata using a web interface. The proposed system will enable historians and humanities researchers to study the data produced by the Bertillon system with much more ease than ever before. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that has tried to automate Bertillon card analysis through the application of existing handwritten digit and word recognition methods. We present our current results on performing document analysis on a selected set of scanned Bertillon cards from the Ohio State Reformatory and Ohio Penitentiary. We conclude with a few recommendations for increasing the likelihood of success for collaborations between Computer Science and Digital Humanities researchers.
AB - We present Decomposing Bodies, a digital humanities project that examines the late-19th-century system of anthropometrical measurement introduced in France by Alphonse Bertillon. "Bertillonnage," as this system is commonly known, was the first measurementbased, state-controlled system used for criminal identification. Currently, researchers resort to the tedious manual transcription in order to study the data on these cards in bulk. Here, we propose an end-To-end system for extracting handwritten text and numbers from scanned Bertillon cards in a semi-Automated fashion and also the ability to browse through the original data and generated metadata using a web interface. The proposed system will enable historians and humanities researchers to study the data produced by the Bertillon system with much more ease than ever before. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that has tried to automate Bertillon card analysis through the application of existing handwritten digit and word recognition methods. We present our current results on performing document analysis on a selected set of scanned Bertillon cards from the Ohio State Reformatory and Ohio Penitentiary. We conclude with a few recommendations for increasing the likelihood of success for collaborations between Computer Science and Digital Humanities researchers.
KW - Bertillon cards
KW - Bertillonnage
KW - Criminal identification history
KW - Digital humanities
KW - Document analysis
KW - Handwritten number recognition
KW - Handwritten text recognition
KW - Information management history
KW - OCR
KW - Visual and material culture studies
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U2 - 10.1145/3093338.3093368
DO - 10.1145/3093338.3093368
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85025843062
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
BT - PEARC 2017 - Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2017
PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
T2 - 2017 Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, PEARC 2017
Y2 - 9 July 2017 through 13 July 2017
ER -