EnrichEuropeana+ (fully titled ‘Enriching Europeana through citizen science and artificial intelligence - unlocking the 19th century') aimed to enhance the Transcribathon Platform as a service for cultural heritage institutions.
EnrichEuropeana+ built upon the results of the EnrichEuropeana project, which redesigned the Transcribathon platform. Transcribathon is an online crowdsourcing platform for the enrichment of digitised material from Europeana.eu.
EnrichEuropeana+ focused on improving Transcribathon as a service for cultural heritage institutions. The project introduced new tools based on innovative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to automate transcription and enrichment processes, allowing users to contribute transcriptions to the extensive collection of digitised cultural heritage content made available through Europeana.eu.
In order to streamline the transcription of documents and make Transcribathon more user-friendly the project utilised Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), a groundbreaking technology initially developed during the H2020 Project READ (2016-2019). This HTR engine is capable of recognising and transcribing handwritten, printed or type-printed documents in various languages and scripts. For the Enrich Europeana+ project, the HTR engine was fine-tuned to enhance its accuracy for European heritage content from the 19th century. The improvements to the Transcribathon platform made in this project offer a more efficient and better experience for those interested in transcribing historical documents and contributing to the preservation of European cultural heritage.
The project organised a crowdsourcing campaign consisting of four events to engage the public in enhancing the semantic and multilingual description of manuscripts related to historical events and societal transformations in Europe in the 19th century. The events had a total of 126 participants who transcribed and annotated more than 2,200 historical documents that were aggregated to Europeana. The project highlighted the results of the campaigns through editorials including exhibitions and blog posts, created in collaboration with the Europeana Education and Research Communities.
Moreover, Enrich Europeana+ successfully delivered 13 capacity-building activities that included webinars, workshops, and online training sessions, with a strong focus on educating cultural heritage professionals in the use of AI, machine translation technologies, and the Transcribathon tool. These efforts resulted in the training of over 470 heritage professionals. In total this project delivered 176,248 new and upgraded high-quality records to Europeana.eu.
This project was a Europeana Generic Services project, and it was co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union.
Austrian Institute of Technology - Austria
Stichting Europeana - The Netherlands
Facts & Files Historisches Forschungsinstitut Berlin Drauschke - Germany
Instytut Chemii Bioorganicznej Polskiej Akademii Nauk - Poland
Read-Coop SCE - Austria
The Provost, Fellows, Foundation Scholars and the other members of Board, of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin - Ireland
Dublin City Council - Ireland
Uniwersytet Wrocławski - Poland
State Archives in Zagreb - Croatia
