Revisiting the 2025 Vienna HTR Winter School for Medievalists

Earlier this winter, CDH / MARBAS Postdoctoral Research Associate Christine Roughan returned to Vienna for the second year in a row to share her experience using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology for medieval texts.

The workshops were part of HTR Winter School 2025, hosted by the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with MARBAS and the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies. The in-person sessions followed three virtual workshops that brought together scholars of Carolingian Latin, Byzantine Greek, and Syriac, among other languages.

“This year I reprised my role as a group leader for the Syriac HTR group alongside Ephrem Aboud Ishac (Austrian Academy of Sciences),” Christine explained. “In addition, I provided instruction to the cohort as a whole on how to apply their HTR training in different contexts, so that their new skills were not tethered to only a single tool.”

As she noted in an interview last year, Christine became involved with Winter School after giving a talk at the Institute for Medieval Research, where she met several of the organizers. At the time, she said that Winter School offered an opportunity for her to hone her skills in teaching methods that play an important role in her own work.

Even more important this year: learning about how this year’s participants will use workshop content to advance their own work.

“My favorite part of the experience was definitely hearing about the variety of research topics the participants were engaged in,” Christine explained. “Seeing their enthusiasm for how the Winter School experience would equip them to dive into those projects was really great, especially in the final days when everyone was now practiced with the methodologies and ready to take off on their own.”

For more information on Winter School, visit https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/imafo/the-institute/detail/htr-of-historical-sources.