Teaching Transkribus Old Finnish Handwriting | Maria Niku #TUC22
Channel: Transkribus
Date: 2022-10-12

Maria Niku, Finnish Literature Society (SKS)
Teaching Transkribus Old Finnish Handwriting
The Finnish humanities organisation where I work has extensive archives of 19th century and older Finnish handwritten materials. Making these materials available as open data, with important research sources made available with full transcriptions, is central to our strategy. This is where Transkribus comes into play.
So far, we have used Transkribus only occasionally, for very limited sets of documents written in Swedish. This is about to change with a publishing program of diaries written in Finnish by important public figures of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The project has two purposes:
Firstly, to produce automatic transcriptions for each set of manuscripts to be published. A transkribus model is created for 75+ pages and this is used to transcribe the rest of the set. The goal here is not to produce flawless transcriptions for display but transcriptions that have a small enough error rate to be usable for full text search (e.g. fuzzy search). 
Secondly, to develop automatic transcription of 19th/early 20th century handwritten Finnish. While multi-hand Transkribus models are already available for Swedish of the same era, such models are not yet available for Finnish. Our aim is to add to an initial model with every new set of diaries, with the hope of eventually growing the model into something like the primarily Swedish NAF Court Records M10 model, which is based on 19th century court records from the Finnish National archives (https://readcoop.eu/model/finnish-19th-century/). Due to the training set involving dozens of different scribes, we have found the model to work well for various different styles of Swedish handwriting.