CopticOCR (CC-BY-SA 4.0 License)

Developers

Göttingen

• So Miyagawa
• Kirill Bulert
• Marco Büchler

Berlin

• Eliese-Sophia Lincke

Coptic

• The final stage of the Ancient Egyptian language used in Egypt from ca. the third century
• A new writing system based on the Greek alphabet and several letters from Demotic (a language stage and writing system used in Egypt from ~ 700 BCE)
• A language transmitted in several regional forms (dialects) with a large production of manuscripts in Sahidic Coptic, the dialect at the basis of our OCR work

Coptic alphabet

• Ca. 30 letters.
• Several diacritics such as tremas, circumflexes, supralinear strokes etc.
• Several punctuation marks such as dots, commas, and colons
• Editorial marks in editions

Why is Coptic OCR needed?

• OCR for Coptic is not well-developed.
• Almost all the Coptic texts in past publications were not OCRed.
• OCR for Coptic is needed by many DH projects in Coptic.
• There is a small amount of human power in Coptology compared with the large amount of unOCRed Coptic editions.

Coptic DH projects (selected)

• SFB 1136 (Göttingen)
  • Creates a text corpus of selected monastic works in Coptic
• Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament (Göttingen)
  • Creates a digital edition of the Coptic translation of the Old Testament
• Coptic SCRIPTORIUM (Georgetown/Pacific)
  • Creates a linguistically annotated Coptic corpus

Existing Coptic OCR

• Tesseract (developed by Ray Smith), for Coptic, trained by Moheb Mekhaiel (http://www.moheb.de/ocr.html)

New method: Ocropy

• Python-based OCR package
• Using recurrent neural networks
• Originally developed by Thomas Breuel
• Available at https://github.com/tmbdev/ocropy
• Trained for Coptic by our group and our collaborator Eliese-Sophia Lincke (Berlin)