Guerrilla Digitisation: An Introduction to Bookscanning

The Moore Institute will host a free one-day workshop, Guerrilla Digitisation: An Introduction to Bookscanning, from 11am-4pm on Monday, May 12.

Led by Meaghan Connell (PhD student, English Department), this workshop is an introduction to the process of digitising texts using only low-cost materials. Digitised texts can be very useful to the humanities researcher; before you can use any kind of computational analysis, you must first create a machine-readable version of your text(s). With machine-readable texts, you can run corpus analyses, create concordances and collocations, and even perform stylometry analyses. If your work involves any computational analysis, or if you want to look into including computational analysis in your work, this workshop may be useful to you.

This workshop is aimed at scholars in the Arts and Humanities, both postgrad students and faculty. This is a hands-on workshop – we will be going through the build of a budget bookscanner and the entire process of scanning, post-processing, and optical character recognition. If you want to build your own budget bookscanner at the workshop, you will need to bring certain materials. Basic computer literacy is a must, but a gentle introduction to the specific software we’ll be using will be provided.

Spaces are limited for this workshop, so you are advised to register your interest by emailing m.connell3@nuigalway.ie as soon as possible.