The Optical Neume Recognition Project
This project is to design and develop a historical document analysis system as a computer assistant for musicologists and historians to help them in their work in studying early western musical manuscripts. Further we intend to use the resulting system to explore open questions in historical musicology.
The guiding premise is construct a system that experts in the field of musicology can use to study the subject documents and explore research hypotheses without requiring advanced computer science expertise. For this reason, features and interfaces of the system are being designed in close cooperation between computer scientists and research musicologists.
Scientific Document Analysis and Abramowitz and Stegun
While document analysis is a rich and varied field of research, only a relatively small part of that field has been devoted to the analysis of scientific documents containing mathematics and technical diagrams. One of the problems that researchers in this sub-area are faced with is the lack of shared datasets that can be used both as test resources and for comparison of algorithms and systems.
Abramowitz and Stegun provide an excellent source of such shared data. As it was published by the United States Government Printing Office, it is copyright free and hence fully available for researchers (and anyone else) to scan, report about and make their results freely available. Its history and the respect in which scientists have held the book make it an authoritative source for many types of expressions, diagrams and tables. The fact that it was printed in the pre-LaTeX days means that it can help researchers to avoid over-tuning their systems to the much more readily available TeX/LaTeX sourced documents
The European Digital Mathematical Library
This project designed and developed a digital mathematical library that integrated many national DMLs across Europe.