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

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.