Recently, the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) organized an event called Research Day 6 (for young and emerging scholars). Two students from our department, PhD student Saranya Chandran and MA student Sydney Szijarto presented their projects at the event.
On February 20, 2025, I presented a paper titled "Developing Handwritten Text Recognition for Garshuni Malayalam: Challenges and Prospects in Multilingual DH" at ACDH-DH Research Day 6, Digital Approaches to Timeless Questions: Emerging Voices in the DH, held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. My presentation explored the complexities of developing an HTR model for Garshuni Malayalam, a historically significant but understudied right-to-left script that combines Syriac and Malayalam. I discussed practical and technical challenges, including accessibility of manuscripts and character connectivity, as well as the broader implications of multilingual digital humanities research. It was excellent platform for engaging with fellow scholars working on digital approaches to historical texts.
Written by Aliz Horvath and Saranya Chandran