Recent Research by Susan Laflin.
I have always been interested in the applications of
Computer Science to History and Archaeology and in 1973 I founded the
annual conference on Computer Applications to Archaeology. In 1997
I and some members of the Birmingham University Field Archaeology
Unit organised the 25th conference at
Birmingham. Details of more recent conferences may be seen at the main
CAA web page or the web-page
for the UK chapter of CAA at www.caauk.org .
Shortly before my retirement, my main research interest was in
methods of handwriting recognition with particular application to
historical documents. Several of my papers were published and a
selection of these may be viewed here. Handwriting Recognition 1992-1995 These papers all relate to the approach to handwriting
recognition which I devised. This requires three main components. The most recent paper, entitled
"A Software Tool for Historical Manuscripts"
was presented at the AHC conference at Montreal in August 1995. This version
was updated on my return from the conference. Another paper, entitled "The
Generation of Gothic Text" was given at the international conference of
the Association for History and Computing at Nijmegen in August 1994. Another paper was given at the Computer Applications in
Archaeology conference at Glasgow in the Spring of 1994 and published in the
proceedings. This paper, entitled "A New Method of
Off-line Text Recognition" described the current state of the project and
is included here. The first paper on this topic, entitled
"An Interactive System for Off-line Text
Recognition" was presented at the History and Computing Conference at
Graz, 24th-27th August 1993 and a version appeared in the proceedings of that
conference. Throughout my earlier career, my research interests were
directed towards the applications of computers to history and archaeology.
In 1973 I started the annual conference in "Computer Applications in
Archaeology". I organised these conferences at Birmingham throughout the
1970s and then, as other universities became interested, others gradually
took over the organisation. Since retiring, I have become interested in local history
and in 2001 was awarded the degree of MA in English Local History. The
dissertation for this and other papers since then may be seen at my home
web page. To view this
please click here. I am also interested in place-names and family
history. While I use my computer experience in this research, I have not
attempted any new computer science research. click here to return to main page. Page maintained by Susan Laflin.
Last updated September 2005.
1) a description of the particular hand which allows ASCII text to be
converted into word-images of the text in that hand.
2) a dictionary of the words which are likely to appear in the text
of the document.
3) a method of pre-processing of an image of a page of the document to
identify the spaces between lines and words and so split the image of the
page into an ordered sequence of word-images.
These unknown word-images can then be compared with the generated images of
known words in an attempt to identify them.
In 1992, I presented a paper on "Analysis of
Pottery from Wroxeter Roman City" at the CAA conference at Aarhus.