Report: Latest Success Story! Medieval Handwriting and Handwritten Text Recognition

From “Latest Success Story! Medieval Handwriting and Handwritten Text Recognition”:

Two partners in the READ project network have now successfully trained a new model to recognise Gothic handwriting!  The State Archives of Zurich (READ project partner) and the University of Zurich (READ project Memorandum of Understanding partner) have collaborated on the automatic recognition of a collection of medieval charters.

In 1336 a cartulary was written in Königsfelden, close to the city of Brugg (which is now part of Switzerland).  Königsfelden abbey was a well-endowed institution with close ties to the dukes of Habsburg.  In a neat and regular handwriting, the charters of the institution were copied on roughly 260 parchment pages. The cartulary is available online via e-codices.

At the University of Zurich, there is an ongoing project to create a digital scholarly edition of the charters of Königsfelden abbey.  The cartulary is an important source for early writing practices and has already been partially transcribed. The project team have been using our Transkribus platform to produce their transcriptions and they used these transcripts to train and test a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model.

Read the full post here.