ForATR is a pilot project funded by the Technology Commission of the University of Zurich (UZH) and hosted at the Digital History Lab of the Department of History. Its goal is to establish technical support services for the digital processing of historical sources. The project responds to the growing need for OCR/HTR technologies, data management, and secure archiving in source-based humanities research, and it promotes the implementation of the FAIR principles in the digital processing of text data.

Since ForATR aims to develop services for all researchers at UZH, we place strong emphasis on building connections across the various research communities that use ATR technologies. Important groundwork for this was laid by the DIZH-funded project PATT, which fostered broad discussions on ATR at UZH and beyond through numerous workshops. ForATR builds on this foundation.

ATR is used at UZH primarily in digital edition projects. For this reason, the Digital History Lab is developing ForATR in close collaboration with the Center for Digital Editions (ZDE), the coordination hub for digital edition projects at UZH. In cooperation with ZDE, ForATR aims to support research projects in the digital processing of text data.

Our methodological approach is based on automatic text recognition (ATR). The use of AI-supported technologies enables more efficient research, the automated creation of standardized text and metadata, and their provision for reuse. We do not develop our own software; instead, we rely on existing solutions, such as commercial tools like Transkribus and open-source applications like eScriptorium, Kraken, OCR4all, and Tesseract, which we adapt to the individual needs of researchers.

Our services at a glance:

• Individual consultation on tools and workflows

• Tool testing and support in developing ATR workflows tailored to research projects

• Implementation support throughout the project by our ATR expert

• A competence hub for digital technologies in the humanities

As part of the pilot project, ForATR’s services are continuously being expanded and further developed.

On 25 November, we officially launched our project with an opening reception at the Pavillon Stockargut, welcoming numerous colleagues from the Department of History and other institutes at the University of Zurich. We used the opportunity to present ourselves and our project as well as engage in stimulating conversations. We are excited to continue this momentum and look forward to collaborating with a wide range of projects and partners in the future.