Uploaded a dataset of 98,877 historical newspaper pages (1700s–1940s) to the Hub, each with its original OCR text, word boxes and confidence scores. huggingface.co/datasets/big...

The Europeana Newspapers dataset on @hf.co now has an `alto` config: the raw ALTO XML for all 5.9M pages. The coordinates for every word, line and block, per-word OCR confidence and font info that the flattened text dropped are back. huggingface.co/datasets/biglam/europeana_newspapers

biglam/europeana_newspapers · Datasets at Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

huggingface.co

Made some improvements to the OCR scripts onboarding in my uv-scripts collection. First run is now a small example: seven scanned NASA pages in, Markdown out, one HF jobs command. It also works on your own images or a folder of PDFs. You can pick from 28 OCR models. huggingface.co/datasets/uv-...

Need a historical illustration? Search 1.49 million images from British Library books and Britannica (1500s–1920s). Find similar images, download full-resolution images or transparent PNG cutouts, and explore the sources. huggingface.co/spaces/davan...

Need a historical illustration? Search 1.49 million images from British Library books and Britannica (1500s–1920s). Find similar images, download full-resolution images or transparent PNG cutouts, and explore the sources. huggingface.co/spaces/davan...

Used Astra + Jobs to see how well this model performs on the full olmOCR-bench Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t do brilliantly overall: 36.8% But for a ~16M-parameter recogniser, I think 74.4% on long/tiny text and 57.9% on multi-column pages are pretty interesting.

Daniel van Strien@danielvanstrien.bsky.social · last mo.

A 15.9M-parameter specialist OCR model outperforms many VLMs hundreds of times larger. On a 2,165-page historical eval dataset, Kraken PP-OCRv6 ranks #4 on reading CER and #1 when long-s, ligatures and case are preserved. huggingface.co/spaces/fineb...

DeepSeek v4.1 Flash is just another level 🤯 huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/... - Asymmetric Causal-Encoder-Decoder: 550B MoE, input 8B / output 16B - Native vision merged into one endpoint - KV cache crushed: ~1/4 the HBM vs last one, 437× smaller than their first model

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash · Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

huggingface.co

OCR for Japanese manga, Swedish handwriting or Arabic print? There’s a growing range of OCR models on @hf.co: VLMs, dedicated text recognisers and complete OCR pipelines. I’ve gathered 41 models into four collections, with short notes to help you choose: huggingface.co/collections/...

OCR on the Hub - a davanstrien Collection

Curated OCR models for documents, languages, handwriting and text in images. Browse four collections with short practical notes.

huggingface.co

A 15.9M-parameter specialist OCR model outperforms many VLMs hundreds of times larger. On a 2,165-page historical eval dataset, Kraken PP-OCRv6 ranks #4 on reading CER and #1 when long-s, ligatures and case are preserved. huggingface.co/spaces/fineb...

📈 New blog post: Training and Finetuning Multi-Vector Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers. As a practical example, I finetuned a ColBERT-style model for medical retrieval. 14.5 hours on one RTX 3090, and it beats every general-purpose retriever I could find. Thread 🧵

Every illustration in the Encyclopaedia Britannica dataset now has an instance mask: 411,385 cut-outs from 115,293 pages, 1768–1929, each linked to its full-resolution scan. Public domain, no image generation involved. Work in progress.

Daniel van Strien@danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Uploaded a dataset of 115,293 illustrated pages from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1st edition (1768) to 14th (1929) to the Hub huggingface.co/datasets/big...

Uploaded a dataset of 115,293 illustrated pages from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1st edition (1768) to 14th (1929) to the Hub huggingface.co/datasets/big...

Every illustration in the British Library's 19th-century book images dataset now has an instance mask: 1.02M clean cutouts of public-domain engravings, no image generation involved! One small segmentation model, $3.24 of compute. Model, masks and a search Space with cutout view all open.

Synthetic data at scale without owning a GPU: datatrove's new Jobs backend + Qwen3.8-27B → 35,837 length-controllable TL;DRs of Hugging Face cards, $0.43 per 1,000. Full guide: danielvanstrien.xyz/posts/2026/d...

FineBooks wants to help re-OCR the public domain to unlock a rich source of data for AI, for researchers, and for enjoyment. Step one: work out which modern OCR models are actually good enough.

Are open OCR models good enough to unlock historical knowledge? @danielvanstrien.bsky.social and I built a leaderboard using six expert-transcribed volumes from the @biodivlibrary.bsky.social sky.social. Meet FineBooks, from @hf.co and @eleutherai.bsky.social! huggingface.co/blog/fineboo...

FineBooks: are open OCR models good enough to unlock historical knowledge?

A Blog post by FineBooks on Hugging Face

huggingface.co

Uploaded a dataset of 1,080,814 public domain images, mostly from 19th-century books, to the Hugging Face Hub: huggingface.co/datasets/big... You can also do semantic search against the images here: huggingface.co/spaces/davan...

Public data on which coding agents actually use the Hugging Face Hub, refreshed monthly. Claude Code now sends a majority of everything the Hub can attribute to a named agent. In May, it led on 4 days out of 30. In July, all 30. huggingface.co/datasets/hug...

A film catalogue tells you what a film is about, not what happens inside it. So: 1,864 public-domain Prelinger films, described every ~60 seconds by an open 2B video model. 23,148 searchable moments. Search "typing on a computer keyboard", land on the second it happens.

New recipe: timestamped video captions on @hf.co Jobs. Point it at a bucket of videos → parquet dataset out: scene descriptions + second-precise <start – end> events. ~$0.05 per hour of footage on a single A10G (Marlin-2B on vLLM). huggingface.co/datasets/uv-...

Small open models are getting genuinely good at document parsing: OvisOCR2 (0.9B, Apache 2.0) is claiming SOTA on OmniDocBench v1.6. Day-1 recipe: OCR a whole HF image dataset — digitised newspapers, archives, zines — to markdown with one command. huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr

Small open models are getting genuinely good at document parsing: OvisOCR2 (0.9B, Apache 2.0) is claiming SOTA on OmniDocBench v1.6. Day-1 recipe: OCR a whole HF image dataset — digitised newspapers, archives, zines — to markdown with one command. huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr

Reading the Archive by Machine: An OCR Benchmark for Historians, 1612–1921 Here is version 1 of a working paper on the new OCR tools that are transforming digital history. working-papers-in-critical-search.github.io/paper-004-oc...

I don't have it yet, but there's an econ history paper in these transcripts or transcripts like them (that we can now turn into textual data at the cost of pennies per hour)

Daniel van Strien@danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Open ASR models with speaker diarization are now fast and cheap: I diarized 174 hours of Apollo 11 mission audio (the real July 1969 NASA tapes) for $9.46 with a 0.9B open model. Search it, hear any moment on the original tape: huggingface.co/spaces/davan...

Open ASR models with speaker diarization are now fast and cheap: I diarized 174 hours of Apollo 11 mission audio (the real July 1969 NASA tapes) for $9.46 with a 0.9B open model. Search it, hear any moment on the original tape: huggingface.co/spaces/davan...

I ran 10 newer OCR models on @ai2.bsky.social's olmOCR-bench "old scans" subset. The ranking flips depending on what you actually want.

Coding agents are real users of the @hf.co Hub! They're searching for models, building and pushing datasets, training models on Jobs, spinning up Spaces... Now there's public data: each agent's share of Hub traffic, updated monthly 👇

The latest @commoncrawl.bsky.social crawl indexes way more than HTML pages. 20.9M PDFs. Plus calendars, BibTeX, markdown... The whole index now lives in a @hf.co Bucket, so I pulled this with one SQL query straight over it (new S3 API). 2.1B rows, nothing downloaded, $0 to read.

You can now use 100s of tools with @hf.co Buckets, thanks to the new S3 API! Usually just one or two lines to change. huggingface.co/docs/hub/sto...

Fairly benchmarking OCR models is hard! Ran a few newer OCR models on @ai2.bsky.social's olmOCR-bench "old scans" subset. Worth knowing: the score "punishes" models for extracting too much (letterheads, stamps, etc.)