+ Decoding famous British engineer’s handwriting

The SS Great Britain trust accepted the challenge of deciphering Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s handwriting. Without technical help this had been a challenge. The team in charge discovered, that his handwriting was “almost impossible to read”. That’s where Transkribus came into play: even though the project-team only started to use Transkribs and the amount of training data wasn’t very high, useful results had already been achieved. Still there is a lot of work to do, as there are several thousand pages of Brunel’s handwriting.

“It’s hugely sped up the process and we’re learning new bits about his life; there’s so much potential to unlock”, says Nick Booth from the SS Great Britain trust. The SS Great Britain in Bristol is keeping the collection of material about the life and works of Brunel and tells the story of one of Britain’s greatest engineers and Brunel’s SS Great Britain, one of the most important historic ships in the maritime history.

The BBC news became aware of the project and published an article about it, which you can find here: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-49347472

More information about Brunel and the SS Great Britain can be found on this homepage: https://www.ssgreatbritain.org

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-49347472