Building Portuguese models for two important document collections | Lucia Werneck Xavier #TUC22
Channel: Transkribus
Date: 2022-10-12

Lucia Werneck Xavier, Lívia Borges Magalhães Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA)
Large Corpi, Big Models, Huge Ambitions: building Portuguese models for two important document collections
Until 2018 there were hardly any use of Transkribus in Portuguese. Since then, three Brazilian projects using two distinct archival materials (handwritten and printed) are developing models for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two groups are working with the “Inquisitorial Documentation” housed at the Portuguese National Archives Torre do Tombo. Although electronic reproductions with high resolution of part of this collection are now online, the search engine available is limited. The third group focused on the “Notary Books of Salvador da Bahia”. One issue here is the low-quality of both document preservation and digitalisation, without any metadata available. Yet, a small number of scholars and stakeholders interested in the History of Portuguese Empire as noticed that, like Kestemont, Christlein and Stutzmann (2017) demonstrated, there was "a strong demand among all stakeholders in the field for automated, computer-assisted techniques" to transcribe, index, annotate and cross-reference both collections. Not long ago, these groups came together to create a large Portuguese general model. The presentation will show the first results of this process as well as the palaeographical and technical challenges they are facing.