Hands-on workshop: How to study books with computer vision: a practical introduction

Staff are warmly invited to a hands-on workshop on computer vision, hosted as part of the School of English 'Digital Horizons in English Studies' seminar series, taking place on 26 February 11am-1pm.

Computer vision — or the extraction of data from images — is an established part of the digital humanist's toolkit. This workshop will introduce participants to some practical applications of computer vision for the study of the printed page, including illustration detection, visual search, difference detection and page-layout recognition, as well as some critical debates within visual AI studies. No prior knowledge of computer vision or coding experience is required, but participants will need a laptop. We will use web-based demos employing open source software created by the Visual Geometry Group at the University of Oxford, in association with humanities researchers studying the book and its contents.

Bio: Dr. Giles Bergel is Senior Researcher in Digital Humanities in the Department of Engineering Science in the University of Oxford. A book historian by training, he researches, teaches and supports the use of computer vision in the humanities and in cultural heritage. He has personal interests in cheap print (ballads, chapbooks and ephemera) and in the history of copyright.

Please register using this link: https://forms.office.com/e/hJ0799HHGJ. Please note we are limited to 20 places for the full workshop and we request you only register for the in-person session if you are certain you can attend the full two hours. The first hour, introducing the tools and some use cases, will be livestreamed on Teams and recorded. We will email to confirm your place closer to the time.