@PhilosTEI: Building Corpora for Philosophers

For philosophers to be able to take a computational turn in their field, especially if that field relies heavily on historical material, it is crucial to be able to build high-quality, easily and freely accessible corpora in a sustainable format composed from multi-language, multi-script books from different historical periods. At the moment, corpora matching these needs are virtually non-existent. Within the CLARIN-NL project @PhilosTEI, we have addressed the problem of building this kind of corpora by developing an open-source, web-based, user-friendly workflow from textual images to TEI, based on state-of-the-art open-source OCR software Tesseract, and a multi-language version of TICCL, a powerful OCR post-correction tool. We have demonstrated the utility of the @PhilosTEI tool by applying it to a multilingual, multi-script corpus of important 18th to 20th century European philosophical texts.

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