The Penn Libraries and South Asia Studies present a space for technology orientation, where participants will strive for a nuanced and informed understanding of the possibilities and limitations of critical digital humanities tools, particularly Computational Text Analysis (CTA) of content found in manuscripts, inscriptions, maps, and other historical documents. The discussions in these sessions aim to bring together South Asia scholars, digital humanities specialists, data librarians, subject specialists, research software & programming engineers, and manuscript studies curators to engage in conversation about the field of collections as data at large.

October 10, 11:00am
KEYNOTE ADDRESS 
Texts as Data: Tools and Perspectives for South Asianists 

Andrew Ollett (Associate Professor, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago) will share the potential of tools like OCR (Optical Character recognition) and HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) of South Asian languages for "normal science" and the prospects of new, problem-oriented, data-aware programs of research.

Free and open to the public

South Asia Studies scholars are invited to apply to participate in hands-on workshop sessions. These sessions will introduce scholars of South Asia to digital tools for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for the practical purpose of searching through texts for specific keywords. OCR and HTR make it possible to transform archival sources into searchable texts. Participants in the hands-on sessions must be prepared to attend both days of the workshop as well as a prior software installation session.

Full schedule & workshop registration: https://www.library.upenn.edu/events/south-asia-studies-dh-workshop