Italian Administrative Hands 1550-1700

The Italian Administrative Hands model features a variety of Italian-language documents from state archives in Milan, Venice, Florence, Pisa, and Genoa. The training set represents a spectrum of humanistic, italic and cursive hands characteristic of administrative records, employed by secretaries and newswriters. The model has been trained to perform well with a mix of quantitative and qualitative information as well as many common proper nouns for the period, such as locations in Europe and contemporary rulers. Administrative documents often employ common superscript abbreviations, which the accompanying documentation treats in greater detail. The model can also be used with Latin, Spanish and French documents to some extent. The model represents a collaboration between Jake Dyble (Exeter/Pisa), Antonio Iodice (Exeter/Genoa), Sara Mansutti (Cork), and Rachel Midura (Virginia Tech). Documentation at https://emdigit.org/tool/2020/07/21/italian-administrative-hands.html.

The model will be used by the EURONews Project and the Medici Archive Project (https://www.medici.org/euronews-project/) and AveTransRisk (https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/research/centres/maritime/research/avetransrisk/team/).