Creating a Public Model for Fifteenth-Century German Handwriting | Julian Helmchen #TUC22
Channel: Transkribus
Date: 2022-10-12

Julian Helmchen, Freie Universität Berlin, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut
Let's Join Forces - Creating a Public Model for Fifteenth-Century German Handwriting
More manuscripts are preserved from the late Middle Ages than from the entire period before. Due to this sheer bulk, many serial sources are not available in editions. Since the interest in these texts often relates to specific names, pragmatic work is not easy. Transkribus offers the optimal solution to generate a text that can be searched with keyword spotting. But so far, there is no public model for the German late Gothic script of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Recently, an international team has come together to change this situation. The researchers intend to combine the material from their individual projects into a large training data set. A first prototype of the public model already achieves good results. The talk will outline the steps taken so far and those planned for the future. We would like to discuss strategies on how the model could be further improved so that it can facilitate access to late medieval manuscripts.