0403, 2019

Competition to automate text recognition for printed Bangla books

By Galia Umansky|March 4, 2019|Uncategorized|0 comments

Tom Derrick 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

0702, 2019

Using Transkribus for a solution to the automated text recognition of historical Bengali Books

By Galia Umansky|February 7, 2019|Uncategorized|0 comments

Alia Carter 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

2405, 2018

Nineteenth Century Bengali Farces and the Comic Tradition

By Galia Umansky|May 24, 2018|Uncategorized|0 comments

Priyanka Basu A farce has often been deemed as a genre not complete in itself, but more in the form of appending a comic representation. Farces have been considered ‘lower’ in status to ‘high comedy’ primarily due to the excess of the comic body in performance and the inherent absurdities in dialogue. In 19th century Calcutta, farces—better known as prahasana—found a prolific expression both in print and on-stage. Proscenium stage

1903, 2018

Working on rare and fragile 19th Century Bengali books at SOAS

By Farzana Whitfield|March 19, 2018|Uncategorized|2 comments

Priyanka Basu has identified about 30 Bengali texts from the 19th century, at our off site Egham repository. These will be looked at closely for metadata enhancement, to assess whether they should be added to our fragile or rare classmark sequence in SOAS Library, (closed access) or are duplicated on our online card catalogue. They are regarded as priority works due to the nature of their subject, their physical status

0712, 2017

Cataloguing Bengali rare books

By Farzana Whitfield|December 7, 2017|Uncategorized|0 comments

As one of the co-investigators on the project I have been working with a Bengali cataloguer at SOAS, Priyanka Basu who joined us in April 2017 to enhance the metadata of our Bengali library records and identify further unique titles up to 1914. Pre 1914 South Asian-language printed books are unavailable in other library collections or are extremely difficult to locate and access. With the aid of a Bengali cataloguer

0512, 2017

Welcome to the 2 Centuries of Indian Print SOAS blog!

By Farzana Whitfield|December 5, 2017|Uncategorized|0 comments

SOAS Library in partnership with the British Library is proud to be working on the Two Centuries of Indian Print project. Money has been received from the Newton Fund (which uses science and innovation partnerships to promote economic development and social welfare) to digitise unique material from our South Asian printed books collection. The project will digitise 4,000 early printed Bengali books as part of the British Library’s collection, amounting