Digital Edition of Historical Travelogues | Sandra Balck and Jacob Möhrke #TUC22
Channel: Transkribus
Date: 2022-10-05

Sandra Balck (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) Regensburg) and Jacob Möhrke (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) Regensburg)
Digital Edition of Historical Travelogues - The role that Transkribus plays
The core of the project stems from the unpublished records of Franz Xaver Bronner's (1758 - 1850) journey from Aarau, via St. Petersburg, to the university in Kazan (1810) and his way back (1817) via Moscow, Lviv and Vienna. A digital edition of these manuscripts will be created, enhanced by Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies, that will enable the analysis and visualisation of textual information and contextual data.
The project will use the annotated critical text edition of the work above as a Case Study with the aim of developing a modularly expandable digital research infrastructure. This infrastructure will support digital transcription, annotation and visualisation of travelogues. 
In the preliminary stages of the project, the first and more extensive part (the outward journey) of Franz Xaver Bronner's travelogue manuscript has already been transcribed with Transkribus. High-quality digital copies were made for Handwritten Text Recognition and training modules were developed on the basis of the manually transcribed texts. These are to be used for the semi-automatic transcription of other related texts. People, places, travel and other events were partly annotated with XML markup elements using Transkribus and were transformed into a TEI/DTABf compliant XML file. 
This lightning talk focuses on our experiences with model training for handwritten text recognition and the transformation process from Transkribus to TEI compliant XML.