Transkribus transcribes the text on a given page line by line and doesn’t discriminate between different forms of formatting such as headings, marginalia or footnotes. To meaningfully structure and separate the transcribed text into smaller units is crucial for text and corpus analysis, e.g., with the Leipzig Corpus Miner (iLCM). To retrieve structured plain text from Transkribus pageXML, further processing is neccessary.
This repository holds utilities for parsing and extracting useful data from Transkribus PageXML outputs, such as a utility for identifying text regions (Paragraph Extractor), and a utility to reconcile Trankribus output metadata with the equivalent data in relevant library catalogues (coming shortly).
Engels, J., Robert Barnett, Erhard, F. X., & Hill, N. (2024). Transkribus_utils: Paragraph Extractor (v1_Paragraph_Extractor). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10810509
View code on Diverge Github
Paragraph Extractor is a utility that accepts Transkribus PageXML as input and then interprets the text regions on each page/image (such as headers, titles, blocks of text, etc.), which we term “paragraphs”. It then returns the raw text of each text region (paragraph) along with its metadata. Note that it reads PageXML, not AltoXML.
Paragraph Extractor was developed by James Engels of SOAS University of London for the Divergent Discourses project.