Beyond 2022 is an exciting project – triggered by a sad accident. In 1922 the Public Record Office in Dublin burned down – and thousands of invaluable historical documents got lost. Beyond 2022 – led by the Trinity College Dublin – is working on a virtual reconstruction of the archive – and its documents. Transkribus is on board.
With Transkribus the project team has developed new models for 19th-century handwritings and achieved nice results. The automated transcriptions shall support the publishing of manuscript collections of the Irish Record Commissioners (1810-1830) held at the National Archives of Ireland (NAI). This is especially important knowing that these volumes contain transcripts of lost originals.
In addition, models have been trained on untidy printed and typewritten text and according to the Beyond 2022-team the results are very satisfying. In their project such models are used to recognise the texts in the Dublin Gazette (1750s-1900s). It has been reported that Transkribus copes well with the columnar layout and has been able to reveal “much more incidental gossip than you might expect in an ‘official’ publication.” The homepage of the project and more information you can access via this link: https://beyond2022.ie/
Image source: https://beyond2022.ie/?page_id=2#collaborations