Funded through grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP) is the first undertaking of its kind to tackle the technical and organizational barriers that historically have stymied the development of Arabic-script OCR and digital text production for Islamicate Studies.
Two phases of the project have been funded until now:
- OpenITI AOCP Phase 1 (2019-2021): The primary technical goal of the first phase of OpenITI AOCP was to achieve ≥97% character accuracy rates (CARs) for OCR on the most used Persian and Arabic print typefaces. Read more
- OpenITI AOCP Phase 2 (2022-2025): The aims of the second phase of OpenITI AOCP include expanding the size of OpenITI’s Persian and Arabic corpus through large-scale OCR work in Persian and Arabic; extending the linguistic capabilities of OpenITI’s OCR tools into Ottoman Turkish and Urdu; and transforming its open-source optical character recognition (OCR)/handwritten text recognition (HTR) pipeline by incorporating newly developed unsupervised machine learning tools into its workflow. Read more