The volume of text available in various digital corpora has grown immensely thanks to numerous ongoing digitization projects, and the continued success of HTR will only further expand these collections. Consequently, the need to take full advantage of these vast resources is more pressing than ever. The ability to identify text-reuse and measure text-similarity is thus more important than ever, offering the potential to see connections never viewed before. AI is the key to making this possible.

This two-day workshop is a continuation of our 2023 event, Finding Connections: Using AI and DNA Sequencing to Find Similarities and Parallels in Medieval Texts, now with an extended focus on general historical sources.

March 5th will be devoted to research presentations across two sessions. In the afternoon, William Mattingly will deliver an associated KIMAFO Lecture: From Physical Object to Structured Data: Building AI Pipelines in Cultural Heritage.

March 6th will take a more informal, hands-on workshop approach. Two morning sessions will be dedicated to work-in-progress reports, plans for implementing AI in various projects, experimental approaches, and open discussions. The afternoon will conclude with a closed practical programming workshop focusing on the application of various AI methods, led by Martin Roček and Gleb Schmidt. 

Registration 
 

Preliminary Program

Thursday, 5th March

9:45 – Registration

10:00 – Welcome and Introduction

10:30-12:00 – Session 1
Chair: Sven Meeder

• Martin Roček and Jan Odstrčilík: Visualising Semantic Similarity
• Jeffrey Witt: Tackling the Granularity Matching Problem in Hierarchical Texts with Multi-Resolution Embeddings
• Jan Maliszewski: What is Semantic Search Good for in Scholastic Corpora?

12:00-13:00 – Invited Lunch for Speakers and Moderators

13:00-14:30 – Session 2
Chair: Gerda Heydemann

• Svetlana Yatsyk: Automatic Cataloguing of the Books of Hours. Textual Unit Identification and Structural Annotation
• Tim Geelhaar: Does AI Break the Chains of Prometheus? Or How AI Can Advance the Analytical Possibilities of the Latin Text Archive (LTA)
• Gabriel Viehhauser: How to Align Medieval Prose Texts and Other Impossibilities

14:30-15:00 – Coffee Break

15:00-17:00 – KImafo Lecture
Moderator: Jan Odstrčilík

William Mattingly: From Physical Object to Structured Data: Building AI Pipelines in Cultural Heritage

Invited Dinner for Speakers and Moderators
 

Friday, 6th March

9:00-10:30 – Session 3
Chair: Martin Roček

• Marin Le Bris: Operationalising Classical Antiquity as a Culture of Reference(s)
• Anna Dolganov: A Multimodal LLM for Ancient Greek: Initial Results and Future Perspectives
• William Mattingly: Data Augmentation for Capturing Variance in Manuscript Traditions

10:30-11:00 – Coffee Break

11:00-12:30 – Session 4
Chair: Gleb Schmidt

• Andrea Scalia: Viral Bible. Biblical Trends Across the Middle Ages
• Sven Meeder and Gleb Schmidt: Text Reuse and the Social Life of Early Medieval Canon Law
• Alexander Marx and Peter Andorfer: Tracing the Tradition of the Roman Conquest of Jerusalem in Latin Texts (c.400-c.1300): A Database with c.2500 Entries

Conclusion of the Public Part

12:30-13:30 – Invited Lunch for Speakers and Moderators

Afternoon: Closed Practical Workshop for Speakers and Moderators