In recent years, newspaper digitization has advanced significantly, with many national and international initiatives focusing on content analysis and providing open access outcomes that follow FAIR principles. However, most of this content is in Latin script. The situation changes dramatically when non-Latin script and/or historical material are processed. In case of Republican Chinese newspapers, those processing approaches are rarely published even within China, and results usually get commercialized.

The Early Chinese Periodicals Online (ECPO) project publishes its data open access. The project aims to develop a pipeline for processing printed materials from Republican China, focusing on complex newspaper layouts. ECPO collaborates with Heidelberg University's Scientific Software Center to establish a page segmentation pipeline using existing tools like State Library Berlin developed Eynollah and Baidu’s PaddleOCR.

Our experiments show that tools trained on Western newspapers did not work well for Chinese data. We had to fine-tune the models using our own ground truth dataset. As we will show, best results stem from a combination of pixel-based Eynollah and box-oriented PaddleOCR. Feeding the text crops into an OCR engine, earlier experiments achieved a character error rate (CER) of <3% for material printed in regular grids and additional llm-based error correction. Recent open vision language models like Alibaba’s QWEN3-VL reach a robust accuracy of ca. 96% independent on the printing grid and without requiring any ground truth.

Establishing an effective pipeline for page segmentation and OCR processing will mark a significant breakthrough in East Asian studies, advancing open access to full texts of the Republican press. Our initiative not only enhances the resources within ECPO but also sets the foundation for future DH projects to process material in other historical contexts.

This paper presents a Digital Humanities project developed in close connection with a completed doctoral dissertation on the manuscript library of the Monastery of Konstamonitou on Mount Athos. The project combines manuscript digitisation, image-based documentation, and scholarly cataloguing, with the aim of transforming a traditional printed catalogue into a structured and reusable digital resource. It addresses digitisation practices in institutionally restricted monastic environments and examines the relationship between manuscript images, metadata, and scholarly access.

The collection comprises 132 codices, including 21 manuscripts identified during on-site research that were previously unknown to scholarship and the monastic community. To date, 62 manuscripts have been digitised through a systematic and phased strategy shaped by research priorities, preservation concerns, and institutional constraints. The heterogeneous physical condition of the codices—including humidity damage, ink degradation, and unstable bindings—directly informed digitisation protocols and imaging priorities. Digitisation is therefore approached not as a neutral act of reproduction, but as a methodological process shaped by material conditions, and digital images are understood as research data rather than simple visual surrogates (Kirschenbaum 2008; Drucker 2011).

Digitised images are embedded within a descriptive metadata framework that enables comparative palaeographical and codicological analysis while acknowledging the epistemological limits of image-based research (Stokes 2015). In parallel, scholarly cataloguing—already completed for 35 manuscripts—forms the foundation of a structured digital corpus.

A central outcome of the project is the reconceptualisation of the manuscript catalogue as a controlled-access online research infrastructure rather than a static printed reference tool. By integrating digitisation, metadata, and cataloguing, the project proposes a model for sustainable and responsible Digital Humanities practice in institutionally restricted environments, demonstrating how manuscript collections such as that of Konstamonitou can be transformed into interoperable digital resources while preserving their material and institutional context (Crane et al. 2011; Hughes, Constantopoulos, and Dallas 2016).

The Atlas of Holocaust Literature is an interdisciplinary research project (digital born, digital only) whose aim is to study Holocaust testimonies and fictional texts based on them in terms of topography and topographical narrative. Currently, the Atlas is based on testimonies from the two largest ghettos in wartime Europe: Warsaw and Łódź. In the future, it is planned to include literary testimonies from other ghettos (Lublin, Sosnowiec). The first, pilot phase of the project was created in 2019 (Warsaw), and the second phase has been ongoing since 2022 (Warsaw and Łódź). The Atlas team is interdisciplinary (literary scholars, historians, digital humanists, cartographers, graphic designers), and the adopted working method is transdisciplinary. A particular goal of the Atlas is the cartographic visualization of the experience of “closed districts”: mapping not so much strictly historical data as literary representations of space.