Brave old world: Application for the development of AI-model for reading 16th- and 17th-century administrative handwriting

Name of applicant

Louise Nyholm Kallestrup

Title

Associate Professor

Institution

University of Southern Denmark

Amount

DKK 194,300

Year

2022

Type of grant

Research Infrastructure

Summary

The Central Administration of the 16th and 17th centuries represents 100.000s of pages in Gothic handwriting. Correspondences, regulations and court records are crucial sources for understanding almost every aspect of early modern history. In recent years the documents have been digitized by the National Archive. However, they are in Gothic handwriting, which makes them unreadable for most people and, even for the trained eye, a time-consuming task to read through. Our project aims at making the court cases accessible through the text recognition tool Transkribus. For now, we will implement the transcribed text within the context of a larger research project. On the long run we intend to make the model public and accessable for scholars and students.

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