Historical Document Processing: Bridging the Gap between Computer Scientists and Humanities Scholars

Dear Colleagues,

Historical documents represent an as-yet unsurpassed source of information for tracking changes in human societies over past centuries. Inventory lists, accounting records, census registry, notary archives, meeting notes, treaties and essays are just a few of the diverse types of documents that have been produced in the past, and from which information has been extracted by scholars in human sciences and economics to draw a picture of the cultural evolution of the mankind.

Artificial intelligence, deep learning and document image analysis research fields have provided methodologies and tools for their storage, access and retrieval, but there are still issues that necessitate better solutions. Moreover, researchers in those fields focus their attention, and thus evaluate the quality of the solutions they elaborate, mostly on technical aspects, and only occasionally consider the perspective of scholars in humanities in both designing and evaluating the performance of the solutions that have been developed.

This Special Issue aims to collect the most recent advances in the field of historical document processing that address the issues outlined above. We request contributions presenting techniques (methods, tools, performance evaluation and analysis) as well as empirical studies that will contribute to the future roadmap of historical document processing, as well as provide guidelines and recommendations for their adoption by humanities scholars.

Prof. Dr. Angelo Marcelli
Prof. Dr. Francesco Fontanella
Guest Editors

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