[Asis-l] Call for Papers Workshop on Digitization ASIST Meeting

[Richard Hill]

[Posted for Dr Christoph Ringlstetter.  Dick Hill]

CFP: ASIST 2011 Workshop on the IMPACT Centre for Digitization. Project
Results and Future Path of Practice and Research. 
October 12, 2011. New Orleans, Louisiana.
http://cis.uni-muenchen.de/asist2011workshop
*************************************************************************

Recent large scale digitization initiatives had a major focus on full text
recognition of historical texts, primarily in the form of out-of-copyright
newspapers and books. However, the available Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) software provides far from satisfactory results for historical
documents. This is due to issues inherent in the material such as warped
pages, bleed-through, historic fonts, broken and irregular characters,
complex layouts, and due to language issues such as historical spelling
variants, extinct vocabulary and mixed language documents e.g. English and
Latin, Dutch and French etc. 

In this workshop we sketch the results of a large scale project Improving
Access to Text (IMPACT) where a team of scientists, industry partners and
library professionals has been developing new approaches to OCR and language
technology to address challenges in historical materials from five centuries
in now nine European languages since its start in 2008. We will discuss the
future direction of work in the area of text digitization from the point of
view of the IMPACT Centre of Competence in Text Digitization that will be
launched in October 2011. This Centre will make digitization of historical
printed text in Europe better, faster, cheaper by sharing expertise and
providing access to tools for all parts of the digitization workflow, as
well as tools, services and facilities for further advancement of the State
of the Art in this field.. One of the main aims of workshop presented at
2011 ASIS&tT is to outline the opportunities for the research community in
historical document processing to engage with this Centre of Competence. We
hope to create a sustainable collaboration between the efforts of the major
European Libraries as well as private and public research institutions
within IMPACT during the last four years and the digitization community in
North America. 

The workshop will be held in a more informal way than a conference with
permanent opportunity to start discussions, also during a presentation. All
participants 
will have an opportunity to briefly present their current research on
digitization. Besides paper presentations we will have a guided discussion
to elaborate the future direction of the research of the European IMPACT
Centre of Competence for Text Digitization as well as its collaboration with
digitization researchers in North America.


*Paper Format*
Potential attendees are encouraged to submit brief papers between two and
four pages. Papers can be a summary of current research results, of best
practices or a position paper. 
The paper should be two to four pages long in ACM format
<http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates>.
Please email .pdf or .doc versions to Christoph Ringlstetter
(christoph at cis.uni-muenchen.de)
by *12 pm September 4, 2011*.

While papers are not due until September 4, we ask that you
inform us about your intention to participate as early as you can
(before August 22) to help us with the organization and planning.
By notifying us early, we will try to confirm your space at the
workshop in time for you to take advantage of the ASIS&T early
registration deadline (Aug 26).

*Workshop Themes*

* Imaging and Image Acquisition 
* Digital Archiving Considerations 
* Historical Collections 
* Digital Document Restoration/Improving Readability 

* Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

* Information Extraction, Retrieval and Presentation
* Methods for Detecting and Correcting Errors in Digitized Text 
* Classification, Grouping and Hyperlinking of Digitized Documents 

* Historical Language Change and its Effects on Digitization, Search and
Presentation

* Surveys Relating to Best Practices 


*Discussion Points and Questions*

* How to select what to digitize.

* Technical issues of imaging and OCR. 

* Full Text. Which qualities can we expect.

* Information Extraction and Search.

* Presentation of a digitized Collection.

* Future Trends in Digitization.




*Important Dates*
August 22, 2011: Intention to participate sent to the organizers
August 26, 2011: ASIS&T early registration deadline
September 4, 2011: Papers due
September 12, 2011: Notifications
October 12, 2011: Workshop

*Organizers*

Hildelies Balk, Project Manager of IMPACT, Head of the European Projects for
Research and Development in the National Library of the Neverlands (KB). 

Clemens Neudecker, Techinical Project Manager, IMPACT.

Aley Conteh, Digitization Program Mangager at the British Library (BL).

Katrien Depuydt, Head of the Language Database Department at the Institute
for Lexicology of the Netherlands (INL)

Christoph Ringlstetter, University of Munich, Center for Information and
Language Processing
----------------------------------------------
Dr Christoph Ringlstetter
Center for Language and Information Processing
University of Munich (LMU)
Schellingstrasse 10
80799 Munich
+49-89-2180-9715
+49-1766-2595344

__________________
Richard B. Hill
Executive Director
American Society for Information Science and Technology
rhill at asis.org
(301) 495-0900
rhill at asis.org