Nikolaus Weichselbaumer | Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (original) (raw)
Books by Nikolaus Weichselbaumer
Zenodo, 2020
Das vorliegende Dokument ist die stark gekürzte Vorabversion eines kommentierten Verzeichnisses d... more Das vorliegende Dokument ist die stark gekürzte Vorabversion eines kommentierten Verzeichnisses der deutschen Schriftgießer und Schriftproben der Handpressenzeit, das der Autor derzeit vorbereitet. So-bald das kommentierte Verzeichnis verfügbar ist, wird es in der Beschreibung dieses Dokuments auf Zenodo verlinkt.
Andreas Beck, Nicola Kaminski, Volker Mergenthaler, Jens Ruchatz (eds.): Visuelles Design. Die Journalseite als gestaltete Fläche/Visual Design. The Periodical Page as a Designed Surface, Hannover: Wehrhahn [see: https://www.wehrhahn-verlag.de/public/index.php?ID\_Section=2&ID\_Product=1317\], 2019
Visual Design: The Periodical Page as a Designed Surface documents the findings of the first inte... more Visual Design: The Periodical Page as a Designed Surface documents the findings of the first international conference of the DFG-funded research unit 2288 »Journalliteratur«. The contributions collected here deal with the visual design of the ›journal‹, taken to mean the whole spectrum of periodical print publications, including amongst others newspapers and magazines. Interest is focused on the periodical page (or double-page spread) as a visible printed surface on which words and images appear in a designed context. The premise is that the written and pictorial content of the periodical is not realized in abstraction, as disembodied and placeless, but remains tied to the periodical’s materiality and its regimen of print, which provide for a two-dimensional and sequential arrangement of diverse visual elements. Thus, periodical-specific elements of (double-)page design are identified and outlined, not least in comparison to the formats of other media, especially the book. The papers deal with aspects of Anglo-American, German-speaking, French and Arabic periodical production, mainly of the ›long‹ nineteenth century.
https://www.wehrhahn-verlag.de/public/index.php?ID_Section=2&ID_Product=1317
Visuelles Design. Die Journalseite als gestaltete Fläche dokumentiert den Forschungsertrag der ersten internationalen Konferenz der DFG-Forschergruppe 2288 »Journalliteratur«. Die hier gebotenen Beiträge widmen sich der visuellen Gestaltung von Journalen, im Sinne der Forschergruppe verstanden als das gesamte Spektrum periodisch erscheinender Printpublikationen. Das Interesse richtet sich auf die Journal(doppel)seite als sichtbare bedruckte Fläche, auf der Worte und Bilder in einem gestalteten Zusammenhang erscheinen. Als Prämisse ist gesetzt, dass die schrift- und bildförmigen Journalinhalte sich nicht abstrakt, körper- wie ortlos, realisieren, sondern an die Materialität und Druckordnung des Journals gebunden bleiben, die eine flächige wie sequentielle Anordnung diverser visueller Elemente vorsehen. Derart werden journalspezifische Momente der (Doppel-)Seitengestaltung konturiert, nicht zuletzt im Vergleich zu anderen Medienformaten, insbesondere dem Buch. Behandelt werden Aspekte anglo-amerikanischer, deutschsprachiger, französischer und arabischer Journalliteratur, überwiegend des ›langen‹ 19. Jahrhunderts.
Hermann Zapf (1918–2015) gilt als einer der bedeutendsten Schriftgestalter, Kalligraphen und Typo... more Hermann Zapf (1918–2015) gilt als einer der bedeutendsten Schriftgestalter, Kalligraphen und Typographen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Sein Werk überspannt mehr als sieben Jahrzehnte, in denen er Schriftklassiker wie Palatino, Optima und Zapfino vorgelegt hat. Daneben war Zapf als Buchgestalter, Berater, Dozent, Unternehmer, Künstler und Aktivist in Urheberrechtsfragen tätig. Die vorliegende Studie nähert sich diesem Werk auf Basis des umfassenden, an der der Herzog August Bibliothek verwahrten Eigenarchivs des Gestalters.
Untersuchungsleitend ist ein feldtheoretisches Konzept von Gestaltung, das Fragen zu Entwurfstechniken und dem Einfluss von Satztechnologien aufwirft, aber auch nach der Entstehung von Zapfs Ansehen und dem Aufbau seines Beziehungsnetzwerks. Durch die Verortung Zapfs im Kontext seiner Zeitgenossen wird mit dieser Werkbiografie ein Schlaglicht auf die Typographie der 2. Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts geworfen.
Papers by Nikolaus Weichselbaumer
Document Analysis and Recognition - ICDAR 2023., 2023
In this paper, we investigate the usage of fine-grained font recognition on OCR for books printed... more In this paper, we investigate the usage of fine-grained font recognition on OCR for books printed from the 15th to the 18th century. We used a newly created dataset for OCR of early printed books for which fonts are labeled with bounding boxes. We know not only the font group used for each character, but the locations of font changes as well. In books of this period, we frequently find font group changes mid-line or even mid-word that indicate changes in language. We consider 8 different font groups present in our corpus and investigate 13 different subsets: the whole dataset and text lines with a single font, multiple fonts, Roman fonts, Gothic fonts, and each of the considered fonts, respectively. We show that OCR performance is strongly impacted by font style and that selecting fine-tuned models with font group recognition has a very positive impact on the results. Moreover, we developed a system using local font group recognition in order to combine the output of multiple font recognition models, and show that while slower, this approach performs better not only on text lines composed of multiple fonts but on the ones containing a single font only as well.
International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) , 2023
Optical character recognition (OCR) has proved a powerful tool for the digital analysis of printe... more Optical character recognition (OCR) has proved a powerful tool for the digital analysis of printed historical documents. However, its ability to localize and identify individual glyphs is challenged by the tremendous variety in historical type design, the physicality of the printing process, and the state of conservation. We propose to mitigate these problems by a downstream fine-tuning step that corrects for pathological and undesirable extraction results. We implement this idea by using a joint energy-based model which classifies individual glyphs and simultaneously prunes potential out-of-distribution (OOD) samples like rubrications, initials, or ligatures. During model training, we introduce specific margins in the energy spectrum that aid this separation and explore the glyph distribution's typical set to stabilize the optimization procedure. We observe strong classification at 0.972 AUPRC across 42 lower-and uppercase glyph types on a challenging digital reproduction of Johannes Balbus' Catholicon, matching the performance of purely discriminative methods. At the same time, we achieve OOD detection rates of 0.989 AUPRC and 0.946 AUPRC for OOD 'clutter' and 'ligatures' which substantially improves upon recently proposed OOD detection techniques. The proposed approach can be easily integrated into the postprocessing phase of current OCR to aid reproduction and shape analysis research.
Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2021
DHd 2020 Spielräume: Digital Humanities zwischen Modellierung und Interpretation, 2020
DigItalia, 2020
Books printed before 1800 present major problems for OCR. One of the main obstacles is the lack o... more Books printed before 1800 present major problems for OCR. One of the main obstacles is the lack of diversity of historical fonts in training data. The OCR-D project, consisting of book historians and computer scientists, aims to address this deficiency by focussing on three major issues. Our first target was to create a tool that identifies font groups automatically in images of historical documents. We concentrated on Gothic font groups that were commonly used in German texts printed in the 15 th and 16 th century: the well-known Fraktur and the lesser known Bastarda, Rotunda, Textura und Schwabacher. The tool was trained with 35,000 images and reaches an accuracy level of 98%. It can not only differentiate between the above-mentioned font groups but also Hebrew, Greek, Antiqua and Italic. It can also identify woodcut images and irrelevant data (book covers, empty pages, etc.). In a second step, we created an online training infrastructure (okralact), which allows for the use of various open source OCR engines such as Tesseract, OCRopus, Kraken and Calamari. At the same time, it facilitates training for specific models of font groups. The high accuracy of the recognition tool paves the way for the unprecedented opportunity to differentiate between the fonts used by individual printers. With more training data and further adjustments, the tool could help to fill a major gap in historical research. OCR-D
INFORMATIK 2020, 2020
The type used to print an early modern book can give scholars valuable information about the time... more The type used to print an early modern book can give scholars valuable information about the time and place of its production as well as its producer. Recognizing such type is currently done manually using both the character shapes of 'M' or 'Qu' and the size of the total type to look it up in a large reference work. This is a reliable method, but it is also slow and requires specific skills. We investigate the performance of type classification and type retrieval using a newly created dataset consisting of easy and difficult types used in early printed books. For type classification, we rely on a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) originally used for font-group classification while we use a common writer identification method for the retrieval case. We show that in both scenarios, easy types can be classified/retrieved with a high accuracy while difficult cases are indeed difficult.
Visuelles Design - Die Journalseite als gestaltete Fläche, 2019
Zeitschrift für bayerische Kirchengeschichte, 2017
HIP ‘19. Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing, 2019
Based on contemporary scripts, early printers developed a large variety of different fonts. While... more Based on contemporary scripts, early printers developed a large variety of different fonts. While fonts may slightly differ from one printer to another, they can be divided into font groups, such as Textura, Antiqua, or Fraktur. The recognition of font groups is important for computer scientists to select adequate OCR models, and of high interest to humanities scholars studying early printed books and the history of fonts. In this paper, we introduce a new, public dataset for the recognition of font groups in early printed books, and evaluate several state-of-the-art CNNs for the font group recognition task. The dataset consists of more than 35 600 page images, each page showing up to five different font groups, of which ten are considered in this dataset.
A s letras caligráficas, isto é, aquelas que tentam imitar o ductus da escrita manual cursiva, co... more A s letras caligráficas, isto é, aquelas que tentam imitar o ductus da escrita manual cursiva, constituíam uma questão marginal na composição tipográfica com chumbo. Em virtude de suas formas filigranadas, eram difíceis de produzir, sensíveis ao manuseio e se apagavam rapidamente na impressão. Além disso, aproximavam-se da escrita caligráfica apenas em casos isolados, como, por exemplo, na English Script, bastante regular também na escrita manual. Entre as fontes caligráficas menos padronizadas e mais livres, um impresso em que cada letra se repete de maneira idêntica pode imitar o aspecto geral da escrita manual apenas de modo bastante restrito. ¶ Esses obstáculos desapareceram no curso do século xx com o estabelecimento de novas tecnologias de composição. As mudanças no design da letra daí decorrentes serão examinadas neste artigo com base no exemplo das letras caligráficas do designer de fontes alemão Hermann Zapf . 1 Zapf, com seus mais de cem designs de fontes, figura entre os mais produtivos e bem-sucedidos desenhistas de letras do século xx. Entre suas criações encontra-se uma série de fontes utilizadas em todo o mundo, como a Palatino (1950), a Optima (1958) e a Zapf Dingbats (1978). ¶ A produção de Zapf estende-se de 1938 até o início do século xxi; desse modo, possibilita uma análise do desenvolvimento das letras de impressão durante a mudança do caractere de chumbo para a fonte do computador. Zapf, habilidoso retocador de fotografias e calígrafo autodidata, passou de copista de música a designer de fontes. Em vários de seus projetos pode-se observar o desenvolvimento das formas a partir da escrita manual. De fato, as fontes de texto constituem grande 1. O presente artigo baseia-se num estudo mais extenso: Der Typograph Hermann Zapf. Eine Werkbiografie, Berlin/Boston, Waltert de Gruyter, 2015. Schriftmedien -Kommunikations-und buchwissenschaftliche Perspektiven n. 2.
Kirwan, Richard / Mullins, Sophie (Hrsg.): Specialist Markets in the Early Modern Book World. Leiden: Brill 2015, S. 331–350., 2015
At the European universities of the thirteenth century the reproduction of manuscripts was fundam... more At the European universities of the thirteenth century the reproduction of manuscripts was fundamentally reorganised. A pecia system was developed to allow for the commercial and efficient copying of books. This facilitated 'publishing' in a previously unknown sense. As soon as a text was available in peciae it could be circulated to doctors, masters and students within weeks. We even know of one case in which Gerard of Abbeville rebutted the beginning of a work by St. Thomas Aquinas which, although not even finished at that point, was already partially in circulation.
Barbier, Frédéric / Dubois, Thierry / Sordet, Yann (Hrsg.): De l’argile au nuage : une archéologie des catalogues. Catalogue de la exposition de la Bibliothèque Mazarine et la Bibliothèque de Genève. Paris: Éditions des Cendres 2015, S. 239–241., 2015
Zenodo, 2020
Das vorliegende Dokument ist die stark gekürzte Vorabversion eines kommentierten Verzeichnisses d... more Das vorliegende Dokument ist die stark gekürzte Vorabversion eines kommentierten Verzeichnisses der deutschen Schriftgießer und Schriftproben der Handpressenzeit, das der Autor derzeit vorbereitet. So-bald das kommentierte Verzeichnis verfügbar ist, wird es in der Beschreibung dieses Dokuments auf Zenodo verlinkt.
Andreas Beck, Nicola Kaminski, Volker Mergenthaler, Jens Ruchatz (eds.): Visuelles Design. Die Journalseite als gestaltete Fläche/Visual Design. The Periodical Page as a Designed Surface, Hannover: Wehrhahn [see: https://www.wehrhahn-verlag.de/public/index.php?ID\_Section=2&ID\_Product=1317\], 2019
Visual Design: The Periodical Page as a Designed Surface documents the findings of the first inte... more Visual Design: The Periodical Page as a Designed Surface documents the findings of the first international conference of the DFG-funded research unit 2288 »Journalliteratur«. The contributions collected here deal with the visual design of the ›journal‹, taken to mean the whole spectrum of periodical print publications, including amongst others newspapers and magazines. Interest is focused on the periodical page (or double-page spread) as a visible printed surface on which words and images appear in a designed context. The premise is that the written and pictorial content of the periodical is not realized in abstraction, as disembodied and placeless, but remains tied to the periodical’s materiality and its regimen of print, which provide for a two-dimensional and sequential arrangement of diverse visual elements. Thus, periodical-specific elements of (double-)page design are identified and outlined, not least in comparison to the formats of other media, especially the book. The papers deal with aspects of Anglo-American, German-speaking, French and Arabic periodical production, mainly of the ›long‹ nineteenth century.
https://www.wehrhahn-verlag.de/public/index.php?ID_Section=2&ID_Product=1317
Visuelles Design. Die Journalseite als gestaltete Fläche dokumentiert den Forschungsertrag der ersten internationalen Konferenz der DFG-Forschergruppe 2288 »Journalliteratur«. Die hier gebotenen Beiträge widmen sich der visuellen Gestaltung von Journalen, im Sinne der Forschergruppe verstanden als das gesamte Spektrum periodisch erscheinender Printpublikationen. Das Interesse richtet sich auf die Journal(doppel)seite als sichtbare bedruckte Fläche, auf der Worte und Bilder in einem gestalteten Zusammenhang erscheinen. Als Prämisse ist gesetzt, dass die schrift- und bildförmigen Journalinhalte sich nicht abstrakt, körper- wie ortlos, realisieren, sondern an die Materialität und Druckordnung des Journals gebunden bleiben, die eine flächige wie sequentielle Anordnung diverser visueller Elemente vorsehen. Derart werden journalspezifische Momente der (Doppel-)Seitengestaltung konturiert, nicht zuletzt im Vergleich zu anderen Medienformaten, insbesondere dem Buch. Behandelt werden Aspekte anglo-amerikanischer, deutschsprachiger, französischer und arabischer Journalliteratur, überwiegend des ›langen‹ 19. Jahrhunderts.
Hermann Zapf (1918–2015) gilt als einer der bedeutendsten Schriftgestalter, Kalligraphen und Typo... more Hermann Zapf (1918–2015) gilt als einer der bedeutendsten Schriftgestalter, Kalligraphen und Typographen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Sein Werk überspannt mehr als sieben Jahrzehnte, in denen er Schriftklassiker wie Palatino, Optima und Zapfino vorgelegt hat. Daneben war Zapf als Buchgestalter, Berater, Dozent, Unternehmer, Künstler und Aktivist in Urheberrechtsfragen tätig. Die vorliegende Studie nähert sich diesem Werk auf Basis des umfassenden, an der der Herzog August Bibliothek verwahrten Eigenarchivs des Gestalters.
Untersuchungsleitend ist ein feldtheoretisches Konzept von Gestaltung, das Fragen zu Entwurfstechniken und dem Einfluss von Satztechnologien aufwirft, aber auch nach der Entstehung von Zapfs Ansehen und dem Aufbau seines Beziehungsnetzwerks. Durch die Verortung Zapfs im Kontext seiner Zeitgenossen wird mit dieser Werkbiografie ein Schlaglicht auf die Typographie der 2. Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts geworfen.
Document Analysis and Recognition - ICDAR 2023., 2023
In this paper, we investigate the usage of fine-grained font recognition on OCR for books printed... more In this paper, we investigate the usage of fine-grained font recognition on OCR for books printed from the 15th to the 18th century. We used a newly created dataset for OCR of early printed books for which fonts are labeled with bounding boxes. We know not only the font group used for each character, but the locations of font changes as well. In books of this period, we frequently find font group changes mid-line or even mid-word that indicate changes in language. We consider 8 different font groups present in our corpus and investigate 13 different subsets: the whole dataset and text lines with a single font, multiple fonts, Roman fonts, Gothic fonts, and each of the considered fonts, respectively. We show that OCR performance is strongly impacted by font style and that selecting fine-tuned models with font group recognition has a very positive impact on the results. Moreover, we developed a system using local font group recognition in order to combine the output of multiple font recognition models, and show that while slower, this approach performs better not only on text lines composed of multiple fonts but on the ones containing a single font only as well.
International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) , 2023
Optical character recognition (OCR) has proved a powerful tool for the digital analysis of printe... more Optical character recognition (OCR) has proved a powerful tool for the digital analysis of printed historical documents. However, its ability to localize and identify individual glyphs is challenged by the tremendous variety in historical type design, the physicality of the printing process, and the state of conservation. We propose to mitigate these problems by a downstream fine-tuning step that corrects for pathological and undesirable extraction results. We implement this idea by using a joint energy-based model which classifies individual glyphs and simultaneously prunes potential out-of-distribution (OOD) samples like rubrications, initials, or ligatures. During model training, we introduce specific margins in the energy spectrum that aid this separation and explore the glyph distribution's typical set to stabilize the optimization procedure. We observe strong classification at 0.972 AUPRC across 42 lower-and uppercase glyph types on a challenging digital reproduction of Johannes Balbus' Catholicon, matching the performance of purely discriminative methods. At the same time, we achieve OOD detection rates of 0.989 AUPRC and 0.946 AUPRC for OOD 'clutter' and 'ligatures' which substantially improves upon recently proposed OOD detection techniques. The proposed approach can be easily integrated into the postprocessing phase of current OCR to aid reproduction and shape analysis research.
Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2021
DHd 2020 Spielräume: Digital Humanities zwischen Modellierung und Interpretation, 2020
DigItalia, 2020
Books printed before 1800 present major problems for OCR. One of the main obstacles is the lack o... more Books printed before 1800 present major problems for OCR. One of the main obstacles is the lack of diversity of historical fonts in training data. The OCR-D project, consisting of book historians and computer scientists, aims to address this deficiency by focussing on three major issues. Our first target was to create a tool that identifies font groups automatically in images of historical documents. We concentrated on Gothic font groups that were commonly used in German texts printed in the 15 th and 16 th century: the well-known Fraktur and the lesser known Bastarda, Rotunda, Textura und Schwabacher. The tool was trained with 35,000 images and reaches an accuracy level of 98%. It can not only differentiate between the above-mentioned font groups but also Hebrew, Greek, Antiqua and Italic. It can also identify woodcut images and irrelevant data (book covers, empty pages, etc.). In a second step, we created an online training infrastructure (okralact), which allows for the use of various open source OCR engines such as Tesseract, OCRopus, Kraken and Calamari. At the same time, it facilitates training for specific models of font groups. The high accuracy of the recognition tool paves the way for the unprecedented opportunity to differentiate between the fonts used by individual printers. With more training data and further adjustments, the tool could help to fill a major gap in historical research. OCR-D
INFORMATIK 2020, 2020
The type used to print an early modern book can give scholars valuable information about the time... more The type used to print an early modern book can give scholars valuable information about the time and place of its production as well as its producer. Recognizing such type is currently done manually using both the character shapes of 'M' or 'Qu' and the size of the total type to look it up in a large reference work. This is a reliable method, but it is also slow and requires specific skills. We investigate the performance of type classification and type retrieval using a newly created dataset consisting of easy and difficult types used in early printed books. For type classification, we rely on a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) originally used for font-group classification while we use a common writer identification method for the retrieval case. We show that in both scenarios, easy types can be classified/retrieved with a high accuracy while difficult cases are indeed difficult.
Visuelles Design - Die Journalseite als gestaltete Fläche, 2019
Zeitschrift für bayerische Kirchengeschichte, 2017
HIP ‘19. Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing, 2019
Based on contemporary scripts, early printers developed a large variety of different fonts. While... more Based on contemporary scripts, early printers developed a large variety of different fonts. While fonts may slightly differ from one printer to another, they can be divided into font groups, such as Textura, Antiqua, or Fraktur. The recognition of font groups is important for computer scientists to select adequate OCR models, and of high interest to humanities scholars studying early printed books and the history of fonts. In this paper, we introduce a new, public dataset for the recognition of font groups in early printed books, and evaluate several state-of-the-art CNNs for the font group recognition task. The dataset consists of more than 35 600 page images, each page showing up to five different font groups, of which ten are considered in this dataset.
A s letras caligráficas, isto é, aquelas que tentam imitar o ductus da escrita manual cursiva, co... more A s letras caligráficas, isto é, aquelas que tentam imitar o ductus da escrita manual cursiva, constituíam uma questão marginal na composição tipográfica com chumbo. Em virtude de suas formas filigranadas, eram difíceis de produzir, sensíveis ao manuseio e se apagavam rapidamente na impressão. Além disso, aproximavam-se da escrita caligráfica apenas em casos isolados, como, por exemplo, na English Script, bastante regular também na escrita manual. Entre as fontes caligráficas menos padronizadas e mais livres, um impresso em que cada letra se repete de maneira idêntica pode imitar o aspecto geral da escrita manual apenas de modo bastante restrito. ¶ Esses obstáculos desapareceram no curso do século xx com o estabelecimento de novas tecnologias de composição. As mudanças no design da letra daí decorrentes serão examinadas neste artigo com base no exemplo das letras caligráficas do designer de fontes alemão Hermann Zapf . 1 Zapf, com seus mais de cem designs de fontes, figura entre os mais produtivos e bem-sucedidos desenhistas de letras do século xx. Entre suas criações encontra-se uma série de fontes utilizadas em todo o mundo, como a Palatino (1950), a Optima (1958) e a Zapf Dingbats (1978). ¶ A produção de Zapf estende-se de 1938 até o início do século xxi; desse modo, possibilita uma análise do desenvolvimento das letras de impressão durante a mudança do caractere de chumbo para a fonte do computador. Zapf, habilidoso retocador de fotografias e calígrafo autodidata, passou de copista de música a designer de fontes. Em vários de seus projetos pode-se observar o desenvolvimento das formas a partir da escrita manual. De fato, as fontes de texto constituem grande 1. O presente artigo baseia-se num estudo mais extenso: Der Typograph Hermann Zapf. Eine Werkbiografie, Berlin/Boston, Waltert de Gruyter, 2015. Schriftmedien -Kommunikations-und buchwissenschaftliche Perspektiven n. 2.
Kirwan, Richard / Mullins, Sophie (Hrsg.): Specialist Markets in the Early Modern Book World. Leiden: Brill 2015, S. 331–350., 2015
At the European universities of the thirteenth century the reproduction of manuscripts was fundam... more At the European universities of the thirteenth century the reproduction of manuscripts was fundamentally reorganised. A pecia system was developed to allow for the commercial and efficient copying of books. This facilitated 'publishing' in a previously unknown sense. As soon as a text was available in peciae it could be circulated to doctors, masters and students within weeks. We even know of one case in which Gerard of Abbeville rebutted the beginning of a work by St. Thomas Aquinas which, although not even finished at that point, was already partially in circulation.
Barbier, Frédéric / Dubois, Thierry / Sordet, Yann (Hrsg.): De l’argile au nuage : une archéologie des catalogues. Catalogue de la exposition de la Bibliothèque Mazarine et la Bibliothèque de Genève. Paris: Éditions des Cendres 2015, S. 239–241., 2015
Jahresbericht der Erlanger Buchwissenschaft 2014, 2014
Jahresbericht der Erlanger Buchwissenschaft 2013
Seit der Inkunabelzeit haben Schriftgießer und Drucker typographische Schriftproben produziert. D... more Seit der Inkunabelzeit haben Schriftgießer und Drucker typographische Schriftproben produziert. Diese haben in mehr als fünf Jahrhunderten eine weitreichende Entwicklung erfahren. Die Anfänge liegen vor 1500, als ein Handel mit Druckschriften noch die Ausnahme darstellte. Ab dem ausgehenden 16. Jahrhundert sind Schriftproben überliefert, die explizit auf den Verkauf der dargestellten Schriften hinweisen. Der erste bekannte Fall ist der des Frankfurter Schriftgießers Konrad Berner, der 1592 ein Schriftmusterblatt druckte, auf dem er erwähnt, dass die abgebildeten Schriften als Lettern zum Verkauf stehen. In der Folge ist eine Ausdifferenzierung der Produzenten und Adressaten von Schriftproben zu beobachten. Es gab Schriftmusterbücher von Schriftgießereien, deren Funktion in der Präsentation und dem Verkauf von Bleisatzschriften lag. Diese Proben waren auf einen internationalen Markt ausgerichtet, zumal nach dem Aufkommen industrieller Schriftgießereien im 19. Jahrhundert. Daneben stehen Schriftproben von Druckereien, die in der Regel keine Schriften zum Verkauf anboten. Diese Proben sollten potentiellen Kunden eine Auswahl an Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten präsentieren sowie die Leistungsfähigkeit der eigenen Druckerei demonstrieren. In Schriftproben dieser Art finden sich regelmäßig verschiedene Satzmuster derselben Schrift, Beispiele für die Qualität des angebotenen Farbdrucks, unterschiedliche Papiersorten und teils sehr aufwändige Bindungen. Teilweise wurden auch Beispiele aus der laufenden Druckproduktion als Anwendungsmuster eingeheftet.
Sinn und Unsinn des Lesens. Gegenstände, Darstellungen und Argumente aus Geschichte und Gegenwart, Apr 16, 2013
Vortrag auf der Tagung ›The Production of Information: Technologies, Media Markets, and Labour in... more Vortrag auf der Tagung ›The Production of Information: Technologies, Media Markets, and Labour in the Twentieth Century‹ im Museum der Arbeit Hamburg am 12.–14. April 2018.
DHd 2019 Digital Humanities: multimedial & multimodal. Konferenzabstracts, 2019
Vorstellung eines Ansatzes zur Automatischen Erkennung von Schriftarten in Digitalisaten alter Dr... more Vorstellung eines Ansatzes zur Automatischen Erkennung von Schriftarten in Digitalisaten alter Drucke mithilfe eines neuronalen Netzwerks.
Eröffnungsvortrag zur Ausstellung ›Wiener Moderne um 1900‹ an der Bibliothek der Philosophischen ... more Eröffnungsvortrag zur Ausstellung ›Wiener Moderne um 1900‹ an der Bibliothek der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Zagreb 26. Mai 2017.
In den Jahren um 1800 galt die klassizistische Typographie als ästhetisches Ideal der Buchgestal... more In den Jahren um 1800 galt die klassizistische Typographie als ästhetisches Ideal der Buchgestaltung und löste in Deutschland den ersten Antiqua-Fraktur-Streit aus. Während Akteure wie Bertuch, Göschen und Unger diese öffentliche Debatte führten, entstand in Berlin eine heute weitgehend vergessene Druckerei, die sich auf die Produktion klassizistischer Spitzentypographie spezialisierte. Gefördert durch den preußischen Hof baute Georg Jacob Decker eine Schriftgießerei und Druckerei auf, die mit den seinerzeit dominierenden Werkstätten in Bologna und Paris konkurrieren und die Qualität der Leipziger Druckereien übertreffen sollte. Zu diesem Zweck wurden Schriften aus Italien und Frankreich beschafft sogar ein Vorarbeiter aus der Druckerei von Pierre Simon Fournier abgeworben. Bei Decker erschienen in der Folge repräsentativ gestaltete Erstausgaben der Gesammelten Werke Friedrichs II. und des Allg. Preußischen Landrechts. In ökonomische Konkurrenz zu Leipzig trat Deckers Berliner Hofbuchdruckei jedoch nicht und die nur sehr zögerliche Annahme der Antiqua in Deutschland verhinderte auch eine umfangreichere Produktion von Antiqua-Prachtausgaben. Die wenigen erschienen klassizistischen Ausgaben zeigen jedoch eine Interpretation des klassizistischen Formenrepertoires, die neben Ausgaben bekannterer Druckereien durchaus bestehen kann.
June 2019, British Library
This talk will introduce the work of the OCR-D project based at the University of Mainz. This pro... more This talk will introduce the work of the OCR-D project based at the University of Mainz. This project has been using images from the British Library's collection of incunabula (books printed in Europe before 1501) recently digitised as part of Heritage Made Digital to improve the accuracy of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for early printed books.
Early modern books were printed using a wide variety of fonts. With respect to incunabula in particular, the distinctive characteristics of these fonts have long been used by historians, bibliographers and librarians as a means of identifying printers. When it comes to OCR, however, the sheer number of fonts presents significant challenges. Most OCR models are trained to work with one of three different training sets, based on either just modern Antiqua fonts, on 19th-century standard Fraktur, or on all fonts that ever existed. Specialist OCR models for the Rotunda or Textura fonts which are so common in books printed before 1501 are few and far between. OCR accuracy rates are therefore low.
This talk will describe two new approaches to this problem which are being developed as part of the OCR-D project. The first is to create a tool that can identify fonts on a scanned page automatically. The second is to create a training infrastructure and font-specific OCR models for a number of font groups. In this way, the recognition rates of OCR for early printed books should be improved significantly.