@article {996,
	title = {Visualising Methodology in The Wiener Library{\textquoteright}s Early Testimony{\textquoteright}s Project},
	number = {16 January 2018},
	year = {2018},
	publisher = {EHRI Document Blog},
	keywords = {Holocaust, Methodology, Testimonies, Wiener Library},
	url = {https://blog.ehri-project.eu/2018/01/16/visualising-methodology-in-the-wiener-librarys-early-testimonys-project/},
	author = {Schmidt, Christine}
}
@article {997,
	title = {Testimony of Valerie Straussov{\'a}},
	number = {11 March 2016},
	year = {2016},
	publisher = {EHRI Document Blog},
	keywords = {Holocaust, Testimonies},
	url = {https://blog.ehri-project.eu/2016/03/11/testimony-of-valerie-straussova/},
	author = {Sedlick{\'a}, Magdalena}
}
@article {995,
	title = {Daily Orders from the Terez{\'\i}n (Theresienstadt) Ghetto},
	number = {18 May 2016},
	year = {2016},
	publisher = {EHRI Document Blog},
	keywords = {Ghetto, Holocaust, Terez{\'\i}n, Theresienstadt},
	url = {https://blog.ehri-project.eu/2016/05/18/daily-orders-from-the-terezin-theresienstadt-ghetto/},
	author = {Schellenbacher, Wolfgang}
}
@article {838,
	title = {EHRI Furthers Educational and Research Opportunities},
	volume = {81},
	year = {2016},
	month = {October 2016},
	pages = {23},
	edition = {October 2016},
	keywords = {EHRI},
	issn = {0793-7199},
	url = {http://www.yadvashem.org/sites/default/files/yv-magazine81.pdf},
	author = {Petra Drenth and Hillel Solomon}
}
@article {758,
	title = {Who holds the key to Holocaust-related sources? Authorship as subjectivity in finding aids},
	journal = {Holocaust Studies},
	year = {2016},
	pages = {1-23},
	abstract = {<p>The field of Holocaust studies relies on a wide variety of archives, dispersed all over the world. Identifying the right sources for a specific research question within this field is not easy or straightforward. Yet Holocaust scholars predominately focus on methodologies for source analysis rather than discovery. Archival finding aids are among the most important tools to aid primary source discovery, but have hitherto not been considered in methodological discussions on Holocaust research. In this article we will reflect on the composition of finding aids based on our work for the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). Our premise is that the content of finding aids is determined by their authors and the context in which they are creating them. The strongest argument for this subjectivity is that our work {\textendash} outlined in this article {\textendash} not only indicates that descriptions of one and the same source differ, but that they can do so quite considerably, and hence can influence research. Our stance is that historians optimize their profit from finding aids by becoming more sensitive to the subjectivity and authorship of descriptions. We conclude by showing how an online environment such as the one developed by EHRI can sensitize historians and archivists to the situated and subjective nature of finding aids by accommodating a plurality of descriptive voices, and encourage them to share their knowledge and become co-authors of finding aids.</p>
},
	doi = {10.1080/17504902.2015.1118193},
	url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2015.1118193},
	author = {Petra Links and Reto Speck and Veerle Vanden Daelen}
}
@article {312,
	title = {The Missing Voice: Archivists and Infrastructures for Humanities Research},
	journal = {International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing},
	volume = {7.1-2},
	year = {2013},
	abstract = {This article offers a critique of the transfer of a technological-scientific paradigm of research infrastructure to the field of the humanities. This critique is informed by our experience of formulating user requirements for the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project, and especially by a series of interviews we undertook with user-facing archivists working at EHRI partner institutions. We argue that the archival voices we recovered during these interviews articulate a range of concerns that clash with some of the major assumptions that frame current discussions about research infrastructure. In particular, we demonstrate that archival research is currently heavily mediated by archivists. And yet, inter-mediation is a theme that is insufficiently explored in recent theorising about research infrastructure. Contextualising our findings within some recent trends in archival science, we show that an infrastructure such as the EHRI must be build around the complex relationship between scholar, archivist and archive. We conclude by indicating how building infrastructures for humanities research may enable us to fruitfully re-conceptualise and re-energise this relationship by transposing it from the physical world to digital environments.},
	url = {https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/the-missing-voice-archivists-and-infrastructures-for-humanities-research(5fa9cce6-d3db-435a-a150-0d47ab857032)/export.html},
	author = {Speck, Reto and Links, Petra}
}
@article {759,
	title = {Developing the collection graph},
	journal = {Library Hi Tech},
	volume = {33},
	year = {2015},
	pages = {610-623},
	doi = {10.1108/LHT-07-2015-0070},
	url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/LHT-07-2015-0070},
	author = {Tobias Blanke and Michael Bryant and Reto Speck}
}
@proceedings {578,
	title = {The EHRI Project - Virtual Collections Revisited},
	volume = {8852},
	year = {2014},
	month = {2015},
	pages = {294-303},
	publisher = {Springer},
	address = {Barcelona},
	doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7},
	url = {http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7/page/2},
	author = {Bryant, Mike and Reijnhoudt, Linda and Speck, Reto and Cl{\'e}rice, Thibault and Blanke, Tobias},
	editor = {Aieollo, Luca Maria and McFarland, Daniel}
}
@conference {362,
	title = {Transcending the Archive? The Digital Environment as a Force for Change},
	booktitle = {Annual Conference of the International Council of Archives: Accountability, Transparency and Access to Information},
	year = {2013},
	month = {23-24 Nov 2013},
	address = {Brussels},
	author = {Anderson, Sheila and Vanden Daelen, Veerle and Speck, Reto}
}
@conference {345,
	title = {Research infrastructures and archival inter-mediation},
	booktitle = {Building infrastructures for archives in a digital world},
	year = {2013},
	month = {26-28 June 2013},
	publisher = {APEx},
	organization = {APEx},
	address = {Dublin},
	url = {http://www.apex-project.eu/index.php/events/dublin-conference/abstracts$\#$LinksSpeck},
	author = {Speck, Reto and Links, Petra}
}
@conference {682,
	title = {Introducing EHRI},
	booktitle = {NISE Annual Gathering},
	year = {2015},
	address = {University of Swansea, Swansea},
	author = {Speck, Reto}
}
@conference {647,
	title = {International cooperation and collaboration / Sustaining digital archival infrastructures},
	booktitle = {APEx: Collaboration and networking for a digital archival future. Sustainable perspectives through the Archives Portal Europe},
	year = {2015},
	month = {7-9 Sep 2015},
	address = {Budapest},
	abstract = {<p>We{\textquoteright}d propose to give a presentation related to the topics {\textquoteleft}International cooperation and collaboration{\textquoteright} and {\textquoteleft}Sustaining digital archival infrastructures{\textquoteright}. In our paper we would reflect on the experiences of developing the EHRI portal from a human perspective: For EHRI connecting archives has been and still is about connecting people. The project ties together professionals in archiving, in information technology and history. Though this cooperation is not always easy and semantic incomprehension is often a risk, we think that it is this multidisciplinary collaboration between professionals working at various institutions and infrastructures that makes the project a success. In our contribution to the APEX conference we intent to illustrate our experiences with pragmatic examples and solutions taken from the first phase of EHRI (2010-2015) and challenges that we are likely to face during the continuation of the project (2015-2019).</p>
},
	url = {http://www.apex-project.eu/index.php/en/news-events/budapest-conference},
	author = {Links, Petra and Speck, Reto}
}
@conference {305,
	title = {Information Extraction on Noisy Texts for Historical Research},
	booktitle = {Digital Humanities},
	year = {2012},
	month = {16-22 July 2012},
	publisher = {Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations},
	organization = {Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations},
	address = {Hamburg},
	abstract = {The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI)1 project aims to create a sustainable Holocaust Research Infrastructure that will bring together documentary evidence from dispersed archives for historical research. EHRI involves 20 partner organisations in 13 countries. It aims to provide open access to Holocaust material such as documents, objects, photos, film and art. One of the challenges of the project is that the dispersed archives of interest to EHRI often do not have the means to sufficiently digitise their resources. Even if the resources are digitally available, they remain inaccessible to searching and browsing by researchers.

For EHRI, we investigated how we can use open source OCR infrastructure developed at King{\textquoteright}s College London for the Ocropodium project (Bryant et al. 2010) so that its output can feed the semantic extraction of metadata useful for research discovery and analysis. Current commercial OCR technology does not serve well such specific research interests in historical document collections, as it cannot be easily customised. Most commercial OCR software products are proprietary {\textquoteleft}black boxes{\textquoteright} which provide digitisation staff with little scope for understanding their behaviour and customising parameters under which they run. At the source level, there is a marked reluctance of OCR software manufacturers to allow access to their code even in a collaborative environment.

In the context of Ocropodium, we developed a workflow tool Ocropodium Web Processing (OWP), with which various open source OCR tools can be combined to create the best possible OCR solution for specific document types. The OWP workflow environment is based on the principles of visual programming environments (Cox \& Gauvin 2011). It allows the user to build custom workflows comprised of discrete processes. The workflows need not be purely linear; instead they take the form of a graph, specifically a directed acyclic graph (DAG). The DAG is comprised of connected nodes, which each perform a discrete function. Nodes can be thought of as functions which take one or more inputs and evaluate these to produce a result. Thus, OWP allows archive staff to embed further services beyond OCR. For this paper, we experimented with information extraction (IE) services to semantically enrich archival descriptions. We present our experiments to evaluate how common off-the-shelf IE services behave against potentially noisy OCR{\textquoteright}d texts.

Semantically enriched library and archive federations have recently become an important part of research in digital libraries (Kruk \& McDaniel 2009). Especially so, as research users often have more demands on semantics than is generally provided by archival metadata. For instance, in archival finding aids place names are often only mentioned in free-form narrative text and not especially indicated in controlled access points for places. Researchers would like to search for these locations. Place name extraction from the descriptions might support this. For the future EHRI infrastructure, we want to use IE services to enrich the researchers{\textquoteright} experience. In our experiments, we concentrated on extracting names and places facets, both immensely important for Holocaust research. 

Our experiments demonstrate the principal workflow using IE tools. In our proof-of-concepts, we did not address larger problems of IE from historical texts, which are manifold. As for OCRing, off-the-shelf commercial IE software has often problems with delivering acceptable results here. For the problems of extracting semantic information from low quality textual data, please compare (Packer et al. 2010), while (Warner \& Clough, 2009) describe plans for a larger extraction project from the UK National Archives. Instead of concentrating on improving the IE itself, we were mainly interested in mapping and evaluating the current state-of-the-art. For the presentation at DH2012, we will deliver exact evaluations of using off-the-shelf IE tools against various levels of underlying {\textquoteleft}dirty{\textquoteright} OCR text, commonly encountered in OCRed historical resources.

Even the off-the-shelf IE tools have already delivered encouraging results. For instance, we OCR{\textquoteright}d PDF files of survivor testimonies sent by the Wiener Library,2 an EHRI partner. The documents were typical fairly low resolution (612{\texttimes}790) grey-scale scans of typed documents. Due to the low resolution we needed to do some advanced preprocessing of the images and scaled the images by a factor of four using an anti-aliasing filter to approximate a typical resolution from 300 DPI scan and finally binarised them (converting a colour or grey-scale image to one containing only black and white). After binarisation, additional filters were applied to deskew the images and remove edge noise.

The resulting transcript produced by the open source Tesseract OCR engine (>Smith 2007) was fairly low quality, with around 90\% character accuracy. We ignored further possible improvements by combining Tesseract with more advanced binarisation and pre-processing tools. As said, in this particular experiment, we were interested how standard IE services would react to low-quality textual input. We used the off-the-shelf OpenCalais service by ThompsonReuters to extract semantic information (Goddard \& Byrne 2010). Even this standard setup has proven to produce useful results. OpenCalais proved successful at detecting the presence of a personal name in the transcript, even when the OCR was imperfect. For example, it detected that {\textquoteleft}Dmulaltsr Tappe{\textquoteright} (Dr. Walter Tappe) was a name. It also marked up several instances of places, such as Berlin and Wilmersdorf. Other incorrectly OCR{\textquoteright}d locations such as {\textquoteleft}Slchsischestraeae{\textquoteright} (Schlesisches) were also marked up as places, due to the (correctly OCR{\textquoteright}d) preceding phrase {\textquoteleft}lived in{\textquoteright}. Further semantic data marked up by OpenCalais included positions ({\textquoteleft}lawyer{\textquoteright}, {\textquoteleft}auditor{\textquoteright}, {\textquoteleft}actor{\textquoteright}) and industry terms ({\textquoteleft}food{\textquoteright}). In several OCR transcripts it detected the topic as {\textquoteleft}politics{\textquoteright}. Social tags given included {\textquoteleft}Berlin{\textquoteright}, {\textquoteleft}Geography{\textquoteright} and {\textquoteleft}Geography of Europe{\textquoteright}. We repeated our experiment with other IE tools such as the open source Annie tool from GATE (>Bontcheva et al., 2002) and could further improve our results, especially as we could rely on advanced gazetteers of place and person names of the Holocaust that are based on long-running community projects.3

These initial successful results will mean that we will develop our OCRing of finding aids into a full service in the context of the EHRI project. We think we can thereby significantly enhance the research experience of using historical archives.
References

Bontcheva, K., H. Cunningham, D. Maynard, V. Tablan, and H. Saggion (2002). Developing reusable and robust language processing components for information systems using GATE. In Database and Expert Systems Applications. Proceedings 13th International Workshop. Berlin: Springer, pp. 223-227.

Bryant, M., T. Blanke, M. Hedges, and R. Palmer (2010). Open Source Historical OCR: The OCRopodium Project Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. In M. Lalmas et al. (eds.), Research and advanced technology for digital libraries.  Berlin: Springer.

Cox, P. T., and S. Gauvin (2011). Controlled dataflow visual programming languages. Proceedings of the 2011 Visual Information Communication {\textendash} International Symposium. Hong Kong: ACM. 

Goddard, L., and G. Byrne (2010). Linked Data tools: Semantic Web for the masses. First Monday 15, 1.

Kruk, S. R., and B. McDaniel (2009). Semantic Digital Libraries. Berlin: Springer.

Packer, T. L., J. F. Lutes, A. P. Stewart, D. W. Embley, E. K. Ringger, K. D. Seppi, and L. S. Jensen (2010). Extracting person names from diverse and noisy OCR text. Proceedings of the fourth workshop on Analytics for noisy unstructured text data. Toronto, ON, Canada: ACM.

Smith, R. (2007). An Overview of the Tesseract OCR Engine. Document Analysis and Recognition. Proceedings 9th International Conference. Berlin:Springer, pp. 629-633.

Warner, A., and P. Clough (2009). A Proposal for Space Exploration at The National Archives. 2011. Available: http://ir.shef.ac.uk/cloughie/papers/York2009.pdf},
	url = {http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/programme/abstracts/information-extraction-on-noisy-texts-for-historical-research/},
	author = {Blanke, Tobias and Bryant, Mike and Speck, Reto and Kristel, Conny}
}
@conference {366,
	title = {European Holocaust Research Infrastructure},
	booktitle = {Tagung Europ{\"a}ische Forschungsinfrastrukturen in den Geisteswissenschaften},
	year = {2012},
	month = {21-22 Feb 2012},
	publisher = {CLARIN-AT and DARIAH-AT},
	organization = {CLARIN-AT and DARIAH-AT},
	address = {{\"O}sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien},
	author = {Schellenbacher, Wolfgang and Rasky, Bela}
}
@conference {830,
	title = {EHRI: Results and Future Activities},
	booktitle = {L-HARP Workshop},
	year = {2015},
	month = {11/2015},
	address = {University of Maryland},
	author = {Speck, Reto and Bryant, Mike}
}
@conference {683,
	title = {EHRI and the International Tracing Service},
	booktitle = {Improving Access to the ITS Digital Collections},
	year = {2015},
	address = {Wiener Library, London},
	author = {Speck, Reto}
}
@conference {837,
	title = {EHRI: An Introduction},
	booktitle = {German Jewish Archive Workshop},
	year = {2016},
	month = {11/2016},
	address = {The Keep, Brighton},
	author = {Speck, Reto}
}
@conference {307,
	title = {Creating general-purpose virtual environments for (digital) archival research },
	booktitle = {Digital Humanities },
	year = {2011},
	month = {19-22 June 2011},
	publisher = {Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations},
	organization = {Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations},
	address = {Stanford California },
	abstract = {This paper will present a critical analysis of our attempts to build Virtual Research Environments (VREs) for everyday Humanities research tasks using digital archives. Numerous specialised VREs have been developed for addressing particular tasks in various humanities disciplines. The Silchester VREs addressed data integration in archaeological excavations, the SDM VRE developed services for sharing and annotating manuscripts, while TEXTvre is concerned with TEI-based resource creation. Building on these experiences, gMan addressed the issue of moving beyond support for specific, focused tasks, and instead building services to enable more general-purpose humanities research activities, such as integrating and organising the heterogeneous and often unstructured digital resources, and support for {\textquoteleft}active reading{\textquoteright} processes Brockman et al. 2001 scholarly work in the humanities and the evolving information environment.},
	url = {http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-198.xml;query=hedges\%20blanke;brand=default},
	author = {Blanke, Tobias and Connor, Richard and Hedges, Mark and Kristel, Conny and Priddy, Mike and Simenoni, Fabio}
}
@conference {831,
	title = {Archivists as Gatekeeper in the Digital Age},
	booktitle = {NIOD Lunchlezing},
	year = {2016},
	month = {03/2016},
	address = {Amsterdam},
	author = {Speck, Reto}
}
@inbook {360,
	title = {The Past and the Future of Holocaust Research: From Disparate Sources to an Integrated European Holocaust Research Infrastructure},
	booktitle = {Evolution der Informationsinfrastruktur: Forschung und Entwicklung als Kooperation von Bibliothek und Fachwissenschaft},
	year = {2013},
	pages = {157-77},
	publisher = {Verlag Werner H{\"u}lsbusch},
	organization = {Verlag Werner H{\"u}lsbusch},
	address = {Gl{\"u}ckstadt},
	doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.3249/webdoc-39006},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1405/1405.2407.pdf},
	author = {Blanke, Tobias and Vanden Daelen, Veerle and Frankl, Michal and Kristel, Conny and Rodriguez, Kepa J. and Speck, Reto},
	editor = {Rapp, Andrea and Lossau, Norbert and Neuroth, Heike}
}
@book {721,
	title = {Guide to the Sources on the Holocaust in Occupied Poland. Translated and expanded edition of the original Polish {\'Z}r{\'o}d{\l}a do bada{\'n} nad zag{\l}ad{\k a} {\.Z}yd{\'o}w na okupowanych ziemiach polskich by Alina Skibi{\'n}ska},
	year = {2014},
	publisher = {European Holocaust Reseaearch Infrastructure},
	organization = {European Holocaust Reseaearch Infrastructure},
	url = {http://training.ehri-project.eu/sites/default/files/portal_assets/skibinska_guide.pdf},
	author = {Skibi{\'n}ska, Alina}
}
