Digitizing Early Modern Chronicles through Crowdsourcing and Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition

Description

In order to investigate the circulation and reception of information by chroniclers in the Low Countries 1500-1850, the project Chronicling Novelty (Leiden University/Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) creates a digital corpus of early modern chronicles. We collected images of manuscripts from more than 40 Dutch and Belgian libraries and archives. The scans of the manuscripts are being transcribed and annotated by volunteers through the crowd sourcing platform VeleHanden.nl combined with automated Handwritten Text Recognition in Transkribus. This paper presents the pipeline we developed to digitize this highly heterogeneous material and share our experiences and some best practices.

Period	22 Apr 2021
Event title	Renaissance Society of America 2021
Event type	Conference
Degree of Recognition	International