Artificial Intelligence in the Digital Humanities

The research in the field of Digital Humanities (DH) has so far been limited to digitization techniques and database organization. However, over the last years, many researchers have pointed out the need for an interdisciplinary approach, which goes from chemical and physical analyses, to microbiology, to Artificial Intelligence. In this paper, we summarize the efforts in this direction of our “MAGIC” project, active for 3 years now in the field of DH, in particular for the application of AI to DH to manuscripts and books of the period 1300-1600. The present short paper will deal with two problems: i) digital restoration of deteriorated pages of books and manuscripts, and ii) transcription of books and manuscripts via OCR and HTR techniques, and for both, we applied AI techniques to improve the automated process. It has to be remembered that only an interdisciplinary approach can give a full overview of these books and manuscripts; on the website www.magic.unina.it, we present the full project and the other work that is underway.