Dan Ingalls PARC Talk on Sanskrit and OCR (1980) [video]
This is a nice talk, in two parts.<p>First, Daniel Ingalls (Sr), the Harvard Sanskritist, gives a talk on (IIRC) some aspects of Sanskrit, the Mahabharata, and some reasons why he was trying to use computers for his task. I found it a reasonably good and impressively concise summary, though not sure how it appears to someone who doesn&#x27;t know Sanskrit — it is clear from the video that he loses the audience at some point (late in his talk) and you get some idea of why he had a reputation for running hard classes and turning out strong students!<p>Then his son, a young Dan Ingalls, gives a talk on his work: OCR for the Devanagari script, specifically for scanned images of the critical edition of the Mahabharata (produced by Sukthankar and team at BORI in Pune). He goes into detail on how he went about the task; as a programmer I found this talk inspiring!