ERC funds Latin book preservation project

Researchers at Durham University have been awarded funding by the European Research Council to develop a new method for digitising early Latin texts.

The research team, led by Professor Barbara Graziosi and Dr Peter Heslin, will receive €150,000 to assist with creating a sustainable optical character recognition process. The university says it hopes to allow people open access to the information located in the old books.

According to Durham University, there is an urgent need for the technology scanning process as more and more information is digitised by libraries and publishers. Old Latin books currently fall behind other literature in the digitising process, and it’s hoped that the ERC funding will assist with bridging this gap.

Latin books are mostly found between the Renaissance and the 19th century, and were the “language of every intellectual discourse” for scholars, philosophers, mathematicians and other prominent thinkers.