The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Northeastern University a $338,357 Project Grant under the Promotion of the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities program (CFDA 45.169). The grant, titled "STC^2: Scalable Text Collation for the Short Title Catalogue of Early Printed Books," will build open data and code infrastructure for metadata, page images, and manual and automatic transcriptions of over 242,000 early modern printed books. The project will collate manual transcripts from the Text Creation Partnership with optical character recognition output from microfilms scanned by the Internet Archive. This dataset will support more accurate OCR, text normalization, restoring textual gaps, detecting manuscript annotations, and contextual embeddings to enhance search and bibliographic analysis. Northeastern will publish the data and all code under an open-source license. The project period runs from February 1, 2025 to January 31, 2027.
Generated 3/4/25, 6:16 AM