To promote digital literacy, DigiLab hosts "Digital IMAFO," an open series of virtual and/or in-person lectures and workshops on topics such as handwritten text recognition, natural language processing, TEI-XML, automatic collation, annotation software, and data visualization. This series is a continuation and expansion of the current "DH at IMAFO-HI" lecture series.
The lab also organizes an annual KIMAFO lecture, which showcases ongoing experiments and projects on the use of artificial intelligence at the Institute. Additionally, DigiLab conducts also various workshops, most notably the Winter School on Handwritten Text Recognition of Historical Sources.
Digital IMAFO
Open series of lectures and workshops (virtual and/or in-person) on topics such as handwritten text recognition, natural language processing, TEI-XML, automatic collation, annotation software, visualization etc. These lectures are both virtual and in-person.
KIMAFO
KIMAFO lectures (in English AIMAFO lectures, i.e. AI at IMAFO) is a platform dedicated to showcasing innovative digital methods in medieval studies that employ AI.
Winter School: HTR of Historical Sources
The Winter School organized by the Institute for Medieval Research (IMAFO) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna since 2022 is an annual program focused on Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) of medieval and early modern documents. In collaboration with MARBAS and Princeton University, the school combines online sessions and an in-person workshop to train participants in using Transkribus for transcribing historical manuscripts in various languages and scripts, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac. Participants work in specialized groups to develop and refine HTR models, contributing to digital humanities research while gaining hands-on experience with cutting-edge transcription technologies.
Other workshops and conferences
The DigiLab also actively participates in organizing workshops and conferences that explore themes related to digital humanities and heritage science.
In cooperation with the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Humanities Initiative at Princeton University, and the Insitute for Advanced Study at Princeton, DigiLab coorgnaized the first meeting of an international HTR exchange network at Princeton in June 2025 (SCOOP - Source Codes of the Past - June 9-13, 2025) and will be organizing a follow-up meeting in Vienna in the summer of 2026. These meetings aim to establish an international HTR network to facilitate the exchange and cooperation of major places and institutions involved in developing these tools for the study of manuscript cultures and handwritten documents from East Asia to Europa and Africa and the Americas.