In February, Priyanka Basu (Project Curator) and Tom Derrick (Digital Curator) of the British Library’s Two Centuries of Indian Print project team undertook a 6 day trip to Mumbai and Indore, in India. During this trip they ran two digital workshops and held meetings with several cultural and archival institutions.

Workshops:

The first workshop, ‘Digitisation Standards and Workflows Workshop’, took place at the Asiatic Society of Mumbai on 5^th February. It focused on best practices for digitisation.

A session was led on OCR for Indian languages that involved an introductory presentation followed by a practical session where the groups had a chance to try out some OCR software at computer terminals.

The groups were shown how to use Transkribus to manually transcribe, mark-up, and categorise text from digitised pages to train Transkribus to automate recognition of Indian scripts. They also learned how to use Tesseract for OCR.

The workshop was a great success, and involved much discussion about digital research and what can be done with digitised material. Certificates of participation were presented at the end of the workshop.

The second workshop, ‘Digitisation Workflows & Digital Research Studies Methodologies’, took place at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) on Monday 11^th & Tuesday 12^th February. It was held over two days with 18 attendees taking part each day in events which included presentations from the British Library and from IIT. It focused on digitisation standards and project lifecycle planning. A significant part of the workshop was devoted to practice with Tesseract OCR.

The workshop finished with a roundtable discussion led by notable professors from Universities and Institutes from Indore and Pune. This discussion touched on some of the prominent strands of thought among the Digital Humanities community in India; such as the importance of multilingualism and awareness and development of open access tools to aid Indian researchers.

The workshop continued with a half-day of presentations the next morning showcasing digital research case studies from both the British Library Digital Scholarship department and two recent projects undertaken at IIT Indore.

 The team also managed to have a tour of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai Library – including a tour of the conservation and digitisation labs, and witnessing a conservator conserving some pages from a very old book. They were also shown the Asiatic Society’s online resource, Granth Sanjeevani, which contains over 20,000 digitised books, newspapers, maps, journals, publications and reports drawn from the Asiatic Society’s collection.

The team also met with Past Perfect Heritage Management, an archiving and research agency that specialises in institutional and family archiving, and colleagues at the Mani Bhavan Ghandi Museum.

The trip was really successful as the project not only managed to deliver two busy and well attended Digital Workshops in South Asia in a short space of time, but there was a lot of interaction with participants in South Asia – and the team came away with many contacts, learning points and ideas for future collaborations.

The Two Centuries of Indian Print project are running a competition, at ICDAR 2019, for automated text recognition of rare and unique printed books written in Bangla that have been digitised through the Library’s Two Centuries of Indian Print project.

This is the second time we are running this competition.  Some of you may remember the Bangla printed books competition which took place at ICDAR2017 which generated significant interest among academic institutions and technology providers both in India and across the world. The 2017 competition set the challenge of finding an optimal solution for automating recognition of Bangla printed text and resulted in Google’s method performing best for both text detection and layout analysis.

Fast forward to 2019 and, thanks to Jadavpur University in Kolkata, we have added more ground truth transcriptions for competition entrants to train their OCR systems with. We hope that this second competition encourages submissions again from cutting-edge OCR methods leading to a solution that can truly open up these historic books, dating between 1713 and 1914, for text mining, enabling scholars of South Asian studies to explore hundreds of thousands of pages on a scale that has not been possible until now.

Image showing a transcribed page from one of the Bengali books featured in the ICDAR2019 competition.

We are collaborating with PRImA (Pattern Recognition & Image Analysis Research Lab) who will provide expert and objective evaluation of OCR results produced through the competition. The final results will be revealed at the ICDAR2019 conference in Sydney in September 2019.

So if you missed out last time but are interested in testing your OCR systems on our books, or you want to have a go at trying again, the competition is now open!

For instructions of how to apply and more about the competition, please visit https://www.primaresearch.org/REID2019/

This post is by Tom Derrick, Digital Curator for Two Centuries of Indian Print, British Library.

He is on Twitter as @TommyID83 and Two Centuries of Indian Print tweet from @BL_IndianPrint

Using Transkribus for a solution to the automated text recognition of historical Bengali Books
As part of the Two Centuries of Indian Print project, Tom Derrick –our Digital Curator based with the
project at the British Library – has been working on solutions to automate text recognition of early
printed Bengali books.

He has recently been using Transkribus for automated text recognition of Bengali printed books.
Transkribus is a READ project and available as a free tool for users who want to automate
recognition of historical documents. The British Library has already had some success using Transkribus on manuscripts from our India Office collection, and this inspired him to see how it would perform on printed Bengali texts, which provides an altogether different type of challenge. It has the potential to help ‘unlock’ keyword searching and text mining in digitised printed collections.

Although Transkribus is most commonly used for automated recognition of handwritten texts, Tom
found it also worked fairly well for printed texts too, including printed texts in Indian scripts. He
tested it with a training set of 50 pages from the British Library’s 19th century printed books written
in Bengali script that have been digitised through the project.

Although this is a very small set compared to other projects using Transkribus he thinks the accuracy
could be vastly improved by creating more transcriptions and re-training the Transkribus recognition
engine – and may be the key to unlocking automated text recognition for not only Bengali but, in
time, other South Asian languages.

He has written a detailed blog of his initial pilot work here, have a read and see if this is a tool you
could use for a similar project!

Monday 3^rd December 2018 marked the last of our current series of South Asia Seminars – which have been successfully running since November 2016. These exciting and varied talks have revolved around the British Library’s South Asia collection as well as the ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ digitisation project.

The free talks at the British Library have created a great platform for researchers, from the UK and overseas, to share their specialist knowledge with the public as well as with other academics. Each of these insightful seminars were followed by further discussions which encourage the British Library Curators, researchers and public to share their thoughts on the topics.

Since the series began a wide range of interesting topics have been explored spanning the historic impact of political, social and cultural changes across South Asia.

For example, our latest talk was by Dr Katherine Butler Schofield from King’s College London and was entitled ‘Miyan Himmat Khan and the Last Mughal Emperors’. The seminar explored musicians in the Mughal court through examining contemporary Indian writings and portraiture of Miyan Himmat Khan kalāwant (d.c.1845) who was chief hereditary musician to the last Mughal emperors. Dr Schofield also contextualised this research by comparing competing lineages of musical knowledge in Persian, Urdu and English c. 1780–1850. This served to show how viewing proto-ethnographic paintings and writings against a new wave of music treatises reveals indigenous modernity running in parallel with colonial knowledge in the most authoritative centres of Hindustani music production. One attendee of this talk commented on the ‘really enlightening, excellently researched seminar’ which was presented with ‘interesting context’ and ‘beautiful complimentary slides’.

Similarly, our earlier talks such as ‘Reintroducing the Celebrated Niʿmatnāmah Half a Century Later’ by independent scholar Preeti Kholsa brought 16^th century gastronomic delights, aromas and indulgences from the Mughal era to the present day. She explored the British Library manuscript, the Niʿmatnāmah, and its many illustrations and accompanying text provide a rare vista into the decadence of this Sultanate court and its obliging female retinue.

Also, our seminar entitled ‘From Sri Lanka to the Western Front: Reginald Farrer’s Buddhism’ by Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, Michael Charlesworth, was well-received. Charlesworth discussed Farrer, who was an alpine plant collector, gardener, and the garden writer who single-handedly changed the way the anglophone world writes about garden plants. In this case, an attendee praised the ‘very enjoyable and engaging speaker’ and the ‘extended Q&A session’ which allowed people to explore ideas further.

This is just a brief selection of the fascinating and engaging talks which have taken place in our series.

In case you missed any of our South Asia Seminars or would like to listen to them again, they are all available to listen to for free online! Just follow the link to the British Library Soundcloud page to enjoy our previous talks:

https://soundcloud.com/the-british-library/sets/south-asian-seminar-series

Thank you to all of the speakers, researchers, facilitators and members of the public who attended our South Asia Seminars! Please be sure to look out for our future talks which will take place in Spring / Summer 2019!  More information will be on the Events page of our British library project webspace: https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/events or our Twitter page: https://twitter.com/BL_IndianPrint

The Two Centuries of Indian Print project is proud to host the second part of a two part workshop being held at the British Library on “Islam and Print in South Asia”.

Part Two will be on Friday 26^th October.

The emergence of print in South Asia has been understood as a transformative moment for Islam in the Subcontinent, heralding a period of revival and reform from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. According to historians such as Francis Robinson, Barbara Metcalfe, Brannon Ingram and others, the introduction of print in the early eighteenth century enlarged and popularised the discursive space of religious authority and encouraged a more local and spatial understanding of religious identity.

However, the discussions on Islam and print in South Asia to date have focused predominantly on Urdu printed texts, on matters of Islamic jurisprudence, ‘ulama or elite individuals and groups, and Islam’s relationship to Hinduism, colonialism and nationalism.

These workshops will widen the scope of earlier scholarship to focus on texts on a range of matters, in different vernaculars, not limited to, but including: Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Dobhashi (Bangla Musulmani), Muslim Mapilla, and Sindhi.

The panels for the second workshop on Friday 26^th October will be on:

• The Social Spaces of the Vernacular
• The Practicalities of Printing: A View from the Trade
• The British Library Collections
• The circulation of religious texts beyond the Subcontinent: from London to Mecca and Calcutta to Australia
• Scandal, Gossip, and Songs

There will be a discussion on workshop themes at the end of the day.

The full programme and abstracts can be found here. Islam and Print Programme 26 October and Islam and Print Abstracts 26 October

The workshops will be held at the British Library in the Foyle Visitor and Learning Centre; British Library Conservation Centre (BLCC), First Floor, British Library

To book a place on the 26^th October workshop, please register on Eventbrite.

The ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print Project’ is pleased to announce a new series of seminars organized as part of their Autumn/Winter 2018 seminar series.

We will be presenting an exciting line-up of talks being held during October – December 2018 on a number of diverse subjects, ranging from ‘Theosophy and Bengali Spirituality’; a talk on ‘Mayalee Dancing Girl versus the East India Company’ and one on ‘Modernist Communities in 1930s Calcutta: Print, Politics and Surveillance’!

No advance booking is required, and all seminars are free to attend.  Unless otherwise advertised, they will take place at the Foyle Learning Centre on the first floor of the British Library, between 5.30-7.00pm.

For further info, and for more details on each one, please see the blog piece on the British Library’s Asian and African studies blog: http://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2018/09/south-asia-series-autumnwinter-2018.html?_ga=2.30766079.1570439055.1537872583-739733038.1478253959 or contact Dr. Priyanka Basu, Project Cataloguer of ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ at Priyanka.Basu@bl.uk.

The ‘South Asia Seminar series’ is a series of talks based around the British Library’s ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ project and the British Library’s South Asian collections (https://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print) with speakers ranging from scholars and academics in the UK and elsewhere, who share their original and cutting-edge research, followed by discussions facilitated by British Library curators and other specialists in the field.

If you have missed any of our seminars, or would like to catch up with them – many are available as podcasts on our project webspace: https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/events

Please do join us!

Image 1: A European, probably Sir David Ochterlony, British Resident to the Mughal court 1803–06 and 1818–25, watching a nautch in his house in Delhi (c. 1820)

(BL Add. Or. 2)

The Two Centuries of Indian Print project is proud to host a two part workshop being held at the British Library on “Islam and Print in South Asia”.

Part one of this two part workshop will be on Friday 28^th September.

The emergence of print in South Asia has been understood as a transformative moment for Islam in the Subcontinent, heralding a period of revival and reform from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. According to historians such as Francis Robinson, Barbara Metcalfe, Brannon Ingram and others, the introduction of print in the early eighteenth century enlarged and popularised the discursive space of religious authority and encouraged a more local and spatial understanding of religious identity.

However, the discussions on Islam and print in South Asia to date have focused predominantly on Urdu printed texts, on matters of Islamic jurisprudence, ‘ulama or elite individuals and groups, and Islam’s relationship to Hinduism, colonialism and nationalism.

Both workshops will widen the scope of earlier scholarship to focus on texts on a range of matters, in different vernaculars, not limited to, but including: Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Dobhashi (Bangla Musulmani), Muslim Mapilla, Sindhi and Pashto.

The panels for the first workshop on Friday 28^th September will be on:

• Arabic printing in India, translation, and the transregional reach of print between the Middle East and South Asia;
• Print and Multilingual religious expression in South Asian Islam;
• Interactions between the Persianate and the vernacular in print;
• Print and Performance: Theatre and Music in 19th century print culture.

The full programme and abstracts can be found here and here.

The workshops will be held at the British Library in the Dickens Room, Knowledge Centre.

To book a place on the 28^th Sept workshop, please register on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/islam-and-print-in-south-asia-workshop-part-1-tickets-50304902317

As well as digitising and making available rare and unique books, the Two Centuries of Indian Print Project also works with South Asian institutions to engage and promote capacity-building and skills-sharing elements between the UK and South Asia.

As part of this two skills-sharing and exchange programmes were organised with the National Library of India (NLI).  These programmes took place in September 2017 and November 2017 and were each five days in length.

The British Library organised these two five-day programmes providing presentations and tours that were led by staff members across all departments of the British Library, including staff based in the two sites that the British Library operates from – London and Boston Spa.

The first Skills Exchange Programme was attended by five senior library officials from the NLI whose interests lay in learning about the operating structures of departments across the whole library, in particular Imaging Studios, Conservation, and Collections Metadata. The second Skills Exchange Programme was attended by five mid-level library officials from the NLI. This group had slightly different interests than the previous group in areas such as events and exhibitions, cataloguing, and outreach responsibilities with local community groups and children. Throughout their five days at the British Library, each group attended 17 presentations and 8 tours led by different members of British Library staff across all different departments within the Library.

The feedback from these programmes was excellent – the group of senior library officials showed great interest in the operating systems in use at the Library such as the methods in which books, when ordered by readers, are sourced in the basements and transferred to reading rooms. They expressed a keen interest in implementing a similar system in the NLI and were given a lot of technical information by managers in these areas who provided them with the information they would need to do this. They were also very interested in Electronic Legal Deposit and collections metadata; and they received interactive presentations in both these areas. One official commented that he felt “upgraded with innovative ideas” after receiving these presentations

The group of mid-level library officials left many examples of what they learned and what practical knowledge and ideas they will take back to implement in India. One of the officials praised the use of clear plastic bags for personal belongings in the reading rooms and plans to implement this system in the NLI on his return as a way to help monitor what readers bring into reading rooms. Another of the officials found the conservation of different materials and textiles very interesting.

Both groups visited the British Library site at Boston Spa, York for a day during their week at the British Library. They noted this as a highlight of the week for them. They greatly enjoyed seeing the deep storage facilities and the use of robotics in sourcing books for reader requests at Boston Spa.

All of the officials on both programmes felt that having online access to the digitised material undertaken on the Two Centuries of Indian Print project and the digitisation of other Indian related material, such as India Office Records, was a great opportunity for users around the world.

As part of the Two Centuries of Indian Print Project, the project is delivering a series of digital skills workshops and training sessions at Indian institutions to support innovative digital humanities research within South Asian studies.

Members of the Two Centuries of Indian Print team have recently just returned from a fascinating trip to Delhi where we took part in an Archivists’ workshop – with packed program of activities organised as part of the Association for Asian Studies.

As part of the program, we led a full day workshop on Digitisation Standards as practiced by the British Library, where we discussed and looked at the key challenges organisations face when digitising cultural heritage material, from selecting material and scanning, through to post-processing, online display, user engagement and promotion.

The workshop featured a paper on the IFLA guidelines for digitisation, and in the afternoon we led a fun activity where the archivists were presented with different case studies of archival collections and asked to consider a digitisation strategy, culminating in a presentation to the groups.

During the program we were also fortunate enough to receive some very thorough and illuminating tours of key archives in Delhi, including The National Archives, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and Sangeet Natak Akademi where we learned about their respective collections, conservation facilities and digitisation projects.

The workshop brought together archivists from a variety of academic and cultural institutions across India and as far away as Cambodia and Australia, uniting people with a shared passion for preserving South Asian heritage.

This marked the end of a trip which has connected us with inspiring professionals who we hope to collaborate on more events in the near future.

More information about our workshops is available on the Training Resources page on the British Library Two Centuries of Indian Print website.

The ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ Project’ is pleased to announce an exciting line-up of talks at the British Library during June – September 2018, featuring a diverse array of subjects such as contemporary Islamic sermons in Bangladesh, territory in colonial India, housing question in colonial Delhi, Qur’an translations into Bangla, history of the P.E.N. in India, Manipuri dance, the Indian dancer Ram Gopal, Deccani scroll paintings and earthquakes!

The South Asia Seminar series is a series of talks based around the British Library’s ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ project (https://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print) and the British Library’s South Asia collections. The South Asia Seminar series began in November 2016 and will continue till Dec 2018, with many exciting topics to come.

The speakers range from scholars and academics in the UK and elsewhere, who will share their original and cutting-edge research, followed by discussions facilitated by British Library curators and other specialists in the field.

No advance booking is required, and all seminars are free to attend.  Unless otherwise advertised, they will take place at the Foyle Learning Centre on the First floor of the British Library, between 5.30-7.00pm.

For further info, and for more details on each one, please see the blog piece on the British Library’s Asian and African studies blog: http://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2018/05/south-asia-series-talks-summer-2018.html or contact Dr. Priyanka Basu, Project Cataloguer of ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ at Priyanka.Basu@bl.uk.

If you have missed any of our seminars, or would like to catch up with them – many are available as podcasts on our project webspace: https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/events

Please do come along, listen and participate!

Image 1: Glimpse on a Sermon Gathering in Bangladesh, 2014 (Photo: Max Stille)

Image 2: South Asia Seminar – Musical Rivalry in Muhammad Shah’s Court: 14 May 2018 (Photo:  Layli Uddin)