O presente trabalho se propõe a refletir sobre a Arte Contemporânea como objeto de investigação histórica a partir da análise da obra do artista brasileiro Cildo Meireles (1948-). Para tanto, buscamos situar a produção do artista enquanto evidência histórica tanto do processo de constituição da linguagem artística, quanto do contexto social e político mais amplo no qual emergiu. Ao longo da pesquisa, analisamos os modos pelos quais o artista dialoga com a história, seja por meio da formulação de intervenções diretas na sociedade, seja por meio de reconfigurações das leituras hegemônicas sobre o passado. / The present study aims at reflecting on contemporary art as an object of historical research by analysing the work of the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles (1948-). Therefore, we seek to situate the production of the artist as historical evidence both of the process of constitution of artistic language and of the broader social and political context in which it emerged. In the course of the research, we have analysed the ways in which the artist establishes a dialogue with history, whether through the development of direct intervention in society or by reconfiguring the hegemonic readings about the past.

O presente trabalho se propõe a refletir sobre a Arte Contemporânea como objeto de investigação histórica a partir da análise da obra do artista brasileiro Cildo Meireles (1948-). Para tanto, buscamos situar a produção do artista enquanto evidência histórica tanto do processo de constituição da linguagem artística, quanto do contexto social e político mais amplo no qual emergiu. Ao longo da pesquisa, analisamos os modos pelos quais o artista dialoga com a história, seja por meio da formulação de intervenções diretas na sociedade, seja por meio de reconfigurações das leituras hegemônicas sobre o passado. / The present study aims at reflecting on contemporary art as an object of historical research by analysing the work of the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles (1948-). Therefore, we seek to situate the production of the artist as historical evidence both of the process of constitution of artistic language and of the broader social and political context in which it emerged. In the course of the research, we have analysed the ways in which the artist establishes a dialogue with history, whether through the development of direct intervention in society or by reconfiguring the hegemonic readings about the past.

We present Intelligent Indexing: a general, scalable, collaborative approach to indexing and transcription of non-machine-readable documents that exploits visual consensus and group labeling while harnessing human recognition and domain expertise. In our system, indexers work directly on the page, and with minimal context switching can navigate the page, enter labels, and interact with the recognition engine. Interaction with the recognition engine occurs through preview windows that allow the indexer to quickly verify and correct recommendations. This interaction is far superior to conventional, tedious, inefficient post-correction and editing. Intelligent Indexing is a trainable system that improves over time and can provide benefit even without prior knowledge. A user study was performed to compare Intelligent Indexing to a basic, manual indexing system. Volunteers report that using Intelligent Indexing is less mentally fatiguing and more enjoyable than the manual indexing system. Their results also show that it reduces significantly (30.2%) the time required to index census records, while maintaining comparable accuracy. A helpful video resource for learning more about this research is available on youtube through this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqdVzEPnBEw

Este estudo contribui para a história da cidade e do porto de Santos (SP) por meio do uso da literatura como documento histórico. Para isso, levantou as condições em que o romance Navios Iluminados (1937) foi escrito, destacou a obra entre outras ficções que têm o porto de Santos como tema e, por fim, interpretou os conteúdos históricos do romance de Ranulpho Prata, comparando-os a outras fontes documentais. A conclusão sugere um novo papel da obra na história literária brasileira. / This study contributes to the history of the city and the port of Santos (SP, Brazil) by using literature as a historical document. To do so, it researched the conditions in which the novel Shinning ships (Navios Iluminados, 1937) was written, highlighted the book among other fictions that have the port of Santos as a theme, and finally interpreted the historical contents of the novel by Ranulpho Prata, comparing them to other documentary sources. The conclusion suggests a new role of this work of art in Brazilian literary history.

Despite decades of research, offline handwriting recognition (HWR) of historical documents remains a challenging problem, which if solved could greatly improve the searchability of online cultural heritage archives. Historical documents are plagued with noise, degradation, ink bleed-through, overlapping strokes, variation in slope and slant of the writing, and inconsistent layouts. Often the documents in a collection have been written by thousands of authors, all of whom have significantly different writing styles. In order to better capture the variations in writing styles we introduce a novel data augmentation technique. This methods achieves state-of-the-art results on modern datasets written in English and French and a historical dataset written in German.HWR models are often limited by the accuracy of the preceding steps of text detection and segmentation.Motivated by this, we present a deep learning model that jointly learns text detection, segmentation, and recognition using mostly images without detection or segmentation annotations.Our Start, Follow, Read (SFR) model is composed of a Region Proposal Network to find the start position of handwriting lines, a novel line follower network that incrementally follows and preprocesses lines of (perhaps curved) handwriting into dewarped images, and a CNN-LSTM network to read the characters. SFR exceeds the performance of the winner of the ICDAR2017 handwriting recognition competition, even when not using the provided competition region annotations.

Este estudo contribui para a história da cidade e do porto de Santos (SP) por meio do uso da literatura como documento histórico. Para isso, levantou as condições em que o romance Navios Iluminados (1937) foi escrito, destacou a obra entre outras ficções que têm o porto de Santos como tema e, por fim, interpretou os conteúdos históricos do romance de Ranulpho Prata, comparando-os a outras fontes documentais. A conclusão sugere um novo papel da obra na história literária brasileira. / This study contributes to the history of the city and the port of Santos (SP, Brazil) by using literature as a historical document. To do so, it researched the conditions in which the novel Shinning ships (Navios Iluminados, 1937) was written, highlighted the book among other fictions that have the port of Santos as a theme, and finally interpreted the historical contents of the novel by Ranulpho Prata, comparing them to other documentary sources. The conclusion suggests a new role of this work of art in Brazilian literary history.

Les récents progrès dans la numérisation des collections de documents patrimoniaux ont ravivé de nouveaux défis afin de garantir une conservation durable et de fournir un accès plus large aux documents anciens. En parallèle de la recherche d'information dans les bibliothèques numériques ou l'analyse du contenu des pages numérisées dans les ouvrages anciens, la caractérisation et la catégorisation des pages d'ouvrages anciens a connu récemment un regain d'intérêt. Les efforts se concentrent autant sur le développement d'outils rapides et automatiques de caractérisation et catégorisation des pages d'ouvrages anciens, capables de classer les pages d'un ouvrage numérisé en fonction de plusieurs critères, notamment la structure des mises en page et/ou les caractéristiques typographiques/graphiques du contenu de ces pages. Ainsi, dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous proposons une approche permettant la caractérisation et la catégorisation automatiques des pages d'un ouvrage ancien. L'approche proposée se veut indépendante de la structure et du contenu de l'ouvrage analysé. Le principal avantage de ce travail réside dans le fait que l'approche s'affranchit des connaissances préalables, que ce soit concernant le contenu du document ou sa structure. Elle est basée sur une analyse des descripteurs de texture et une représentation structurelle en graphe afin de fournir une description riche permettant une catégorisation à partir du contenu graphique (capturé par la texture) et des mises en page (représentées par des graphes). En effet, cette catégorisation s'appuie sur la caractérisation du contenu de la page numérisée à l'aide d'une analyse des descripteurs de texture, de forme, géométriques et topologiques. Cette caractérisation est définie à l'aide d'une représentation structurelle. Dans le détail, l'approche de catégorisation se décompose en deux étapes principales successives. La première consiste à extraire des régions homogènes. La seconde vise à proposer une signature structurelle à base de texture, sous la forme d'un graphe, construite à partir des régions homogènes extraites et reflétant la structure de la page analysée. Cette signature assure la mise en œuvre de nombreuses applications pour gérer efficacement un corpus ou des collections de livres patrimoniaux (par exemple, la recherche d'information dans les bibliothèques numériques en fonction de plusieurs critères, ou la catégorisation des pages d'un même ouvrage). En comparant les différentes signatures structurelles par le biais de la distance d'édition entre graphes, les similitudes entre les pages d'un même ouvrage en termes de leurs mises en page et/ou contenus peuvent être déduites. Ainsi de suite, les pages ayant des mises en page et/ou contenus similaires peuvent être catégorisées, et un résumé/une table des matières de l'ouvrage analysé peut être alors généré automatiquement. Pour illustrer l'efficacité de la signature proposée, une étude expérimentale détaillée a été menée dans ce travail pour évaluer deux applications possibles de catégorisation de pages d'un même ouvrage, la classification non supervisée de pages et la segmentation de flux de pages d'un même ouvrage. En outre, les différentes étapes de l'approche proposée ont donné lieu à des évaluations par le biais d'expérimentations menées sur un large corpus de documents patrimoniaux. / Over the last few years, there has been tremendous growth in digitizing collections of cultural heritage documents. Thus, many challenges and open issues have been raised, such as information retrieval in digital libraries or analyzing page content of historical books. Recently, an important need has emerged which consists in designing a computer-aided characterization and categorization tool, able to index or group historical digitized book pages according to several criteria, mainly the layout structure and/or typographic/graphical characteristics of the historical document image content. Thus, the work conducted in this thesis presents an automatic approach for characterization and categorization of historical book pages. The proposed approach is applicable to a large variety of ancient books. In addition, it does not assume a priori knowledge regarding document image layout and content. It is based on the use of texture and graph algorithms to provide a rich and holistic description of the layout and content of the analyzed book pages to characterize and categorize historical book pages. The categorization is based on the characterization of the digitized page content by texture, shape, geometric and topological descriptors. This characterization is represented by a structural signature. More precisely, the signature-based characterization approach consists of two main stages. The first stage is extracting homogeneous regions. Then, the second one is proposing a graph-based page signature which is based on the extracted homogeneous regions, reflecting its layout and content. Afterwards, by comparing the different obtained graph-based signatures using a graph-matching paradigm, the similarities of digitized historical book page layout and/or content can be deduced. Subsequently, book pages with similar layout and/or content can be categorized and grouped, and a table of contents/summary of the analyzed digitized historical book can be provided automatically. As a consequence, numerous signature-based applications (e.g. information retrieval in digital libraries according to several criteria, page categorization) can be implemented for managing effectively a corpus or collections of books. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed page signature, a detailed experimental evaluation has been conducted in this work for assessing two possible categorization applications, unsupervised page classification and page stream segmentation. In addition, the different steps of the proposed approach have been evaluated on a large variety of historical document images.

The usefulness of digitized documents is directly related to the quality of the extracted text. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has reached a point where well-formatted and clean machine- printed documents are easily recognizable by current commercial OCR products; however, older or degraded machine-printed documents present problems to OCR engines resulting in word error rates (WER) that severely limit either automated or manual use of the extracted text. Major archives of historical machine-printed documents are being assembled around the globe, requiring an accurate transcription of the text for the automated creation of descriptive metadata, full-text searching, and information extraction. Given document images to be transcribed, ensemble recognition methods with multiple sources of evidence from the original document image and information sources external to the document have been shown in this and related work to improve output. This research introduces new methods of evidence extraction, feature engineering, and evidence combination to correct errors from state-of-the-art OCR engines. This work also investigates the success and failure of ensemble methods in the OCR error correction task, as well as the conditions under which these ensemble recognition methods reduce the Word Error Rate (WER), improving the quality of the OCR transcription, showing that the average document word error rate can be reduced below the WER of a state-of-the-art commercial OCR system by between 7.4% and 28.6% depending on the test corpus and methods. This research on OCR error correction contributes within the larger field of ensemble methods as follows. Four unique corpora for OCR error correction are introduced: The Eisenhower Communiqués, a collection of typewritten documents from 1944 to 1945; The Nineteenth Century Mormon Articles Newspaper Index from 1831 to 1900; and two synthetic corpora based on the Enron (2001) and the Reuters (1997) datasets. The Reverse Dijkstra Heuristic is introduced as a novel admissible heuristic for the A* exact alignment algorithm. The impact of the heuristic is a dramatic reduction in the number of nodes processed during text alignment as compared to the baseline method. From the aligned text, the method developed here creates a lattice of competing hypotheses for word tokens. In contrast to much of the work in this field, the word token lattice is created from a character alignment, preserving split and merged tokens within the hypothesis columns of the lattice. This alignment method more explicitly identifies competing word hypotheses which may otherwise have been split apart by a word alignment. Lastly, this research explores, in order of increasing contribution to word error rate reduction: voting among hypotheses, decision lists based on an in-domain training set, ensemble recognition methods with novel feature sets, multiple binarizations of the same document image, and training on synthetic document images.

在政治權力結構中，權臣與派系在其政治人物的社會網絡中扮演重要的角色。本論文研究由職官年表中探勘權臣與派系。我們提出資料探勘演算法由職官年表中探勘循序共現樣式，以探勘出政府官員官職陞貶的共現關係。接著根據所探勘出的循序共現樣式，建立官員之間的社會網絡。透過社會網絡分析中的網絡中心性與社群偵測分別探勘出權臣與派系。本論文以清康熙時期的職官年表實驗驗證。透過視覺化分析顯示本論文所提出的方法有助於歷史學者的研究。 / In a power structure, chief officials and cliques play important roles in the social network and have high influence on politics. This thesis proposes an approach of social network mining from official chronologies to discover the chief officials and the cliques. We propose and develop the algorithm to discover the sequential co-occurrence patterns from official chronologies. Then the social network is constructed based on the discovered sequential co-occurrence patterns. Chief officials are discovered by network centrality analysis while cliques are discovered by community analysis of the constructed social network. The official chronology of Kangxi Emperor is taken as an example for experiments and the visualization analysis demonstrates that the proposed methods are helpful to assist historian for historical research.

We use a Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCNN) to classify pixels in historical document images, enabling the extraction of high-quality, pixel-precise and semantically consistent layers of masked content. We also analyze a dataset of hand-labeled historical form images of unprecedented detail and complexity. The semantic categories we consider in this new dataset include handwriting, machine-printed text, dotted and solid lines, and stamps. Segmentation of document images into distinct layers allows handwriting, machine print, and other content to be processed and recognized discriminatively, and therefore more intelligently than might be possible with content-unaware methods. We show that an efficient FCNN with relatively few parameters can accurately segment documents having similar textural content when trained on a single representative pixel-labeled document image, even when layouts differ significantly. In contrast to the overwhelming majority of existing semantic segmentation approaches, we allow multiple labels to be predicted per pixel location, which allows for direct prediction and reconstruction of overlapped content. We perform an analysis of prevalent pixel-wise performance measures, and show that several popular performance measures can be manipulated adversarially, yielding arbitrarily high measures based on the type of bias used to generate the ground-truth. We propose a solution to the gaming problem by comparing absolute performance to an estimated human level of performance. We also present results on a recent international competition requiring the automatic annotation of billions of pixels, in which our method took first place.