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  • 2016
    • January 27
      • Read Project launches
        • 150 people gathered at the Hessian State Archives in Marburg (Germany) for the 'Technology meets Scholarship' conference. This conference was the first public event of the READ project.
    • February 6
      • German Libraries Day
        • The German Libraries Day is a large event woth more than 3 000 participants from all over Europe. In Leipzig, Welf Wustlich and Günter Mühlberger gave an introduction to the READ project, as well as to one of the core technologies behind it.
    • March 16
      • Conference at Archives Nationales
        • Louise Seaward gave an introduction to the READ project at a conference at the Archives Nationales in Paris.
    • May
      • READ meets in Valencia
        • The Universitet Politècnica de València hosted a technical meeting where the group considered a range of current research questions in small workshops
    • June
      • National Archives Finland takes first steps towards Handwritten Text Recognition
        • 500 digitised pages of the National Archives of Finland have been uploaded and transcribed in the Transkribus platform.
      • Bringing archives and technology together!
        • The READ project is featured in the latest issue of Insights magazine, which is produced by the ICARUS organisation.
    • September 20-22
      • The READ project comes back to Germany
        • The Passau DIocesan Archives hosted an all-staff meeting in Passau, Germany.
    • October 10
      • What should be in your Digital Toolbox? Coference on 10 October 2016
        • The Linnean Society of London, in collaboration with the Transcribe Bentham initiative at University College London (UCL), was hosting a one-day conference, which showcased how innovative technology is being applied to the humanities and natural sciences.
    • September 29-30
      • Demystifying Digitisation: A Hands-On Master Class in Text Digitisation
        • The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities-Belgium (DARIAH-BE) and Digital Humanities Flanders (DHuF) were organising a two-day event for digital humanities researchers, called "Demystifying Digitisation: A Hands-On Master Class in Text Digitisation" at the University of Antwerp.
    • September 13-14
      • Conference - "Philology in the future!
        • The READ project was present at the Nordic Network seminar on "Philology in the future".
    • September 7
      • The READ network expands - into digital scholarly editing
        • The Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) is the latest institution to join the READ network as a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) partner.
    • September 13-16
      • READ at the DocEng2016 symposium
        • The DocEng symposium in 2016 was organised by one of the READ partners, the Computer Vision Lab at Vienna University of Technology and Dr Günter Mühlberger, the project coordinator of READ, delivered one of the keynote lectures.
    • October 20-21
      • Digital Scholarly Editing in Switzerland - new READ events in Zürich
        • The Transkribus software, as well as other tools developed by the Read project, were presented.
    • September 27
      • Historic transcription meets digitisation - Transkribus workshop in Jena
        • The Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena hosted a workshop on "Automatic Text and Structure Recognition as Elementary Technologies for Digital Humanities" filled with plenary lectures and a hands-on Transkribus workshop.
    • October 10
      • Opening up our Digital Toolbox - conference at Linnean Society in London
        • There was much interest in our "Digital Toolbox" conference, which took place at the Linnean Society in London.
    • October 27
      • Searching Handwritten Manuscripts at Greifswald University Library
        • Around 800 pages of documents and transcripts from the University Archives of the Greifswald University Library have been uploaded to Transkribus.
    • November 3
      • A user's perspective on Transkribus!
        • Melina has been using Transkribus to create training data for a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model that can provide automatic transcripts of the correspondence of the Brothers Grimm.  This work was undertaken as part of a pilot project called Tracing Authorship in Noise (TrAIN), which is analysing how page noise affects the accuracy of HTR and OCR.
    • December 5-7
      • See Transkribus in action at Digital Humanities Austria Conference
        • The 3rd Digital Humanities Austria Conference was taking place at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, where also the READ project was there.
    • November 25
      • Transkribus comes to Youtube!
        • Transkribus now has a Youtube channel.
    • November 29
      • Working with a small crowd - Transcribing the "Bozner Ratsprotokolle"
        • The crowdsourcing initiative Transcribe Bentham is already part of the READ project and we will be creating a new open source crowdsourcing platform which can be used and adapted by any institution which would like to get volunteers to work on a manuscript collection.  We have also begun working with a small focus group of volunteers to introduce them to the Transkribus transcription platform and the possibilities of HTR technology.
    • December 16
      • Another partner joins the Read project network
        • The READ project network continues to expand, as we welcome a new Memorandum of Understanding partner from Finland!  The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland  exists to preserve and promote knowledge about Swedish language and culture in Finland.
  • 2017
    • February 2
      • Finding patterns in eighteenth-century weddings - new blog from Xerox
        • Xerox Research Centre Europe is one of the READ research partners, with responsibility for Document Understanding.  Document Understanding is a crucial part of the process of training computers to recognise historical documents, as Hervé Déjean from the Xerox team explains in his blog.
    • February 6
      • New article in Update magazine for Library professionals
        • Louise Seaward (Bentham Project) and Elaine Charwat (formerly of The Linnean Society) have written about their work with READ in the following article in Update, the magazine of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP).
    • February 15
      • It's competition time! Launch of new ScriptNet platform
        • The READ project is pleased to announce the launch of ScriptNet!  ScriptNet is a new platform of competitions related to Handwritten Text Recognition and Document Image Analysis.
    • February 21
      • Georgian Papers Programme working with Transkribus
        • The Georgian Papers Programme is an exciting collaboration between King's College London and the Royal Collection Trust, along with US partners Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and William & Mary.
        • The project is cataloguing, digitising and making available manuscripts relating to the reign of the British King George III (1760-1820).  In doing so, it aims to enhance public understanding of the monarchy during an important period of British history.
    • February
      • Read presents at Digital Humanities conference - report from DHd 2017
        • The READ project was present at the DHd 2017 in Bern, Switzerland.  The annual conference of digital humanities in German brings together scholars and scientists working at the intersection of humanities and digital technologies. In addition to presentations of new approaches and technological as well as scholarly developments, the focus was laid on sustainability.
    • March 22
      • Gotherburg calling! Report from Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries conference
        • The READ project visited Sweden for the second Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries conference.  The conference was hosted by the University of Gothenburg and organised by the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries association, which was founded in 2015.
    • March 31
      • Welcoming The British Library to the READ project network!
        • We are very happy to welcome The British Library into the READ project network as a Memorandum of Understanding partner.  The British Library collection is vast, containing more than 150 million items including a copy of Magna Carta and papers written by The Beatles.
    • April 7
      • A new model for Humanities research - collaboration with HumaReC
        • HumaReC is a new research platform developed by the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics.  It is part of a project to investigate the digital production and publication of Humanities data using an edition of a New Testament manuscript as a test case.
    • May 8
      • Machine Reading the Archive in Cambridge
        • The READ project made it to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge for our latest workshop.  Louise Seaward (Bentham Project, University College London) and Sebastian Colutto (University of Innsbruck) delivered a presentation and workshop on automated text recognition for handwritten and printed text.
    • June 1 - 2
      • DATeCH Conference - learn about Handwritten Text Recognition at our workshop
        • The DATeCH International Conference was fast approaching on 1-2 June 2017 in Göttingen. The conference was a forum for innovative work on the creation, use and transformation of digitised historical documents.
    • June 9
      • Latest success story! Medieval Handwriting and Handwritten Text Recognition
        • Two partners in the READ project network have successfully trained a new model to recognise Gothic handwriting!  The State Archives of Zurich (READ project partner) and the University of Zurich (READ project Memorandum of Understanding partner) have collaborated on the automatic recognition of a collection of medieval charters.
    • June 13
      • Handwritten Text Recognition success with Italian documents from Archivio Storico Ricordi
        • The Archivio Storico Ricordi is one of the most important private music collections in the world and it has started to work with Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to process some of its treasures.  Founded in Milan in 1808, the Casa Ricordi publishing house contains a wealth of letters and scores from noted composers like Verdi and Puccini.
    • June 23
      • Venice Time Machine and READ - new article in Nature journal
        • This issue of Nature carried a fascinating article on the work of Venice Time Machine project at  the Digital Humanities Lab, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).  This initiative is one of the READ project partners and it is working to digitize, annotate and index a huge cache of documents from 1000 years of Venetian history.
    • June 30
      • Trolls and water spirits - transcribing Swedish folklore records with Handwritten Text Recognition
        • The Institute for Language and Folklore in Sweden holds a collection of more than 30,000 pages of folklore records written by the Swedish folklorist Carl-Martin Bergstrand between the 1920s and the 1960s.  Dr Fredrik Skott, an associate professor and research archivist at the Institute, has helped to train a HTR model to automatically transcribe these documents.
    • July 6
      • Keyword searching in Handwritten Text - new breakthrough with French medieval records
        • The Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology (PRHLT) research centre at the Universitat Politècnica de València is part of the HIMANIS project.  HIMANIS stands for Historical MANuscript Indexing for user-controlled Search and like READ, it is a project which aims to use new technology to open up access to cultural heritage documents.
    • July 12
      • International Medieval Congress 2017
        • The International Medieval Congress is one of the biggest events for Medievalists from all over the world. For this year's Congress more than 2,400 scholars and enthusiasts took the University of Leeds by storm and spent four days in the city on the River Aire.
    • July 17
      • The Austrian government meets READ DocScan and ScanTent!
        • The Computer Vision Lab at Technical University Vienna are working to ensure that digitization on demand is on its way to an archive near you!  This team of computer scientists are developing two new tools that will help people digitize documents using their mobile phone, with high levels of efficiency and accuracy.
    • July 28
      • New collaboration between public and archives in Finland
        • The National Archives of Finland has started working with members of the public to train Handwritten Text Recognition technology to process a significant set of nineteenth-century court documents.
    • August 15
      • Transkribus crosses the Atlantic . report from DH 2017 in Montreal
        • The READ project made one of its first forays across the Atlantic to attend the Digital Humanities 2017 conference in Canada.  The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations welcomed hundreds of researchers to McGill University in Montreal for an intensive week of workshops, presentations and panels on the question of using digital tools to further humanities research.
    • August 17
      • Transkribus on TV! National Archives of FInland filmed for national news programme
        • Viewers of the Finnish TV channel MTV 3 have been given an insight into the READ project mission to make archival material more accessible with the application of Handwritten Text Recognition technology.  Reporters from the channel visited the National Archives of Finland and made a short feature about their work with READ.
    • October 4
      • READ workshop in Cologne
        • Tobias Hodel from the State Archives of Zurich visited the Cologne Centre for eHumanities to participate in their Digital Humanities Colloquium.  The colloquium is a series of open lectures on current digital research topics that are documented in blog posts by students who attend.
    • October 18
      • Exciting new partnerships for READ
        • On our Network page, you can see a full list of more than 50 institutions and projects who have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with us and started to test out our Handwritten Text Recognition technologies on all sorts of historical collections.
    • September 29
      • READ technology at European Researchers' Night
        • One of the READ project partners, the National Centre for Scientific Research (NCSR) 'Demokritos' recently participated in the 2017 European Researchers' Night event held in Athens at the Cultural Centre 'Hellenic Cosmos'.  Over 300 European Researchers' Night events took place simultaneously on Friday 29 September 2017 in cities around the continent.
    • November 14
      • Transkribus users come together for our first conference!
        • The first Transkribus User Conference was an interesting, inspiring and thought-provoking few days.  Around 80 users, mostly (although not all!) from Europe met in Vienna to hear about the latest research in automated text recognition and discuss their experience of and hopes for the Transkribus platform.
    • November 27
      • Call for papers - special issue on Automated Text and Layout Recognition!
        • The Journal of Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (JLCL) was calling for contributions for a forthcoming special issue on automatic text and layout recognition.
    • December 13
      • Data First!? READ participates in DIgital Humanities Austria Conference
        • The University hosted Digital Humanities Austria 2017, a major conference which invited presenters to think about the quality and quantity of data in the field under the theme 'Data first!?'. READ project partners were part of the Programme and Organising Committees for the conference and also presented their work to conference attendees.
    • December 18
      • Transkribus features as part of "A Year in Archives 2017"
        • Transkribus has been featured in a leaflet published by the National Archives in the United Kingdom.  A Year in Archives 2017 showcases the innovative work that archives around the UK have been doing to collect and preserve local heritage and make it accessible to a wide audience.  The leaflet considers how the Bentham Project at University College London and The Linnean Society of London have been working with Handwritten Text Recognition technology.
    • December 21
      • Winning competitions and awards! READ technology is at the cutting-edge
        • In the field of computer science, official competitions give researchers the chance to refine new technologies and ensure that the best techniques rise to the fore. In fact, the READ project has its own platform for research competitions (ScriptNet), where computer scientists can participate in or organise competitions.
  • 2018
    • January 2
      • READ on the radio in Serbia
        • Transkribus and the READ project have been featured on national radio in Serbia!  Our partnership with the Library of the University of Belgrade (who is one of READ's MOU partners) was the subject of an episode of the 'Digital Icons' programme, which was broadcast (in Serbian) on Radio Belgrade 2 on 2 January 2018.  'Digital Icons' is a long-running series presented by Tamara Vučenović which presents news and analysis relating to digitisation in science and culture.
    • January 4
      • Latest new partnerships for the READ project!
        • We have an impressive 64 partners in our MOU network!
    • February 5
      • Blog post from The British Library - Handwritten Text Recognition of India Office Records
        • The British Library, one of the READ project's Memorandum of Understanding partners, has been working with Transkribus to process records from the India Office.  This collection relates largely to the London-based administration of the East India Company and pre-1947 government of India.
    • February 8
      • Teach yourself to read historical handwriting with Transkribus Learn!
        • The first version of our new e-learning app, Transkribus Learn, is now live! Transkribus Learn allows users to train themselves to read historical handwriting by practicing transcribing individual words in a simple and easy-to-use interface.
    • February 14
      • New project working with Transkribus - the Imperial Library in Vienna
        • The project is called The Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters. Sebastian Tengnagel (d. 1636), the Imperial Library in Vienna, and Knowledge about the Orient and is based at the University of Vienna.  The project aims to investigate the relationship between the global position of the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth-century and its role in mediating European knowledge about the Orient.
    • February 21
      • Recognising Linnaeus' handwriting
        • The Linnean Society of London has recently produced some promising results in its experiments with our Transkribus platform.
    • February 26
      • Transcribing Bentham with a computer
        • The Bentham Project at University College London, which works on the scholarly edition of the writings of the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, has become increasingly involved with digital humanities across the past decade.  The project has undertaken the digitisation of thousands of Bentham manuscripts and in 2010 launched one of the first academic crowdsourcing initiatives, Transcribe Bentham.  Exciting experiments with Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) have also been ongoing over the past few years.
    • March 12
      • Transkribus volunteer tackles Danish handwriting
        • Vagn Mørkeberg Christiansen is a retired volunteer at the Faxe Municipality Archives in Denmark.  The archives were interested in using Transkribus to open up a collection of early twentieth-century minutes for transcription and searching.  Vagn was invited to undertake this experiment.
    • March 21
      • Learn about Transkribus at a Digital Archives workshop in London
        • On 21 March in London, a free workshop was taking place at the Institute of Historical Research that gave an introduction to Transkribus and other digital archival tools.
    • April 11
      • Keyword Spotting: search handwritten documents with Transkribus!
        • Transkribus can automatically produce transcripts of historical material with very impressive results, where 90-95% of characters in a given transcript are correct. 
    • April 19
      •  Transcribing wills at The National Archives (UK)
        • Dr Richard Dunley from The National Archives in the UK has recently blogged about his team's work on a model to process a collection of English Will registers.
    • April 25-27
      • Document Analysis Systems workshop in Vienna
        • One of the major workshops for computer scientists working in the fields of Document Analysis took place in Vienna on 24-27 April 2018.
    • May 1
      • English Cycling diaries recognised by University of Warwick
        • Archivist Elizabeth Wood and her team have recently trained a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model to recognise the writing in a collection of cycling diaries written in English during the early twentieth century by David Allan Hamilton.
    • May 23
      • Time Machine takes one step closer to FET Flagship success
        • The Time Machine is a pioneering digital humanities initiative which was bidding for funding from the EU's FET Flagship scheme. Congratulations are in order - the initiative has passed the first stage of the selection process and has been invited to prepare a detailed proposal for a huge 1 billion euros of EU funding.
    • June 4
      • Transkribus appears on Heise online!
        • 'Transkribus deciphers your Grandma's handwriting' declared the headline of an article on Heise online, a popular German technology news site which boasts over 20 million visits per month. This fantastic coverage has given a significant boost to registrations in our Transkribus platform for Automated Text Recognition. Nearly 2000 new users have registered since the article appeared online.
    • June 8
      • 2018 Scanathon
        • On Friday 8 June 2018 there was a flurry of READ activity in London, Helsinki and Zurich as we held our first ever international Scanathon!  We decided to celebrate International Archives Day by inviting archivists and archival users to test out the DocScan mobile app and the ScanTent device, new tools for digitisation on demand in archives.
    • June 11
      • Transkribus on the road with the University Library of Belgrade
        • The University Library of Belgrade (one of the READ Memorandum of Understanding partners) has been chosen by the Serbian Ministry of Culture to represent the country at a series of global book fairs during 2018.  Representatives from the library already traveled to the Leipzig fair in March and also to Beijing, Moscow and Frankfurt - with Transkribus in tow!
    • June 22
      • Transcribing Foucault's handwriting with Transkribus
        • The team at the Foucault fiches de lecture (Foucault's Reading Notes) project, have trained a model to recognise the philosopher's writing with around 90% accuracy.  Automated transcripts will be vital to the project's objective: to analyse and provide online access to the large collection of Foucault's fiches de lecture (organised citations, references and comments) held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
    • June 28
      • Article on automated transcription and search of seventeenth-century document
        • The Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology research group at the Universitat Politècnica de València (one of the READ project partners) have published an article exploring their work processing seventeenth-century botanical documents in the latest issue of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.
    • July 9
      • Transkribus recognises early modern German correspondence
        • The Gender History research group at the University of Jena (Thuringia, Germany) have been experimenting with Transkribus as part of a digital edition project on the correspondence of the eighteenth-century regent, Erdmuthe Benigna von Reuß-Ebersdorf (1670-1732).
    • August 3
      • Reading admiral de Ruyter's journal - using existing transcripts to train Automated Text Recognition
        • Nicoline van der Sijs is part of a team of researchers working at the Meertens Institute in the Netherlands (one of the READ MOU partners).  The team has trained an Automated Text Recognition model to process the handwriting of Michiel de Ruyter, a Dutch admiral from the seventeenth century.
    • August 28
      • Eighteenth-century medical casebooks - transcribed with Transkribus!
        • The team in Special Collections at the library of the University of Leeds (one of the READ project MOU partners) have transcribed around 15,000 words from Hey's medical casebooks in our Transkribus platform and used this data to train two Automated Text Recognition models to recognise Hey's writing.
    • October 3
      • Sharing data with Transkribus - Transcribimus and minutes of Vancouver City Council
        • We can all agree that it's nice to share - and in the READ project, sharing data brings direct benefits for the Handwritten Text Recognition technology in our Transkribus platform.  According to principles of machine learning, the more images and transcripts that are submitted to us as training data, the stronger the Handwritten Text Recognition technology can become.  Images and transcripts are not publicly shared but they contribute to a general improvement in the technology behind the scenes. Transcribimus is a community project based in Vancouver, Canada with a sizeable collection of transcripts which they will be using to train an Handwritten Text Recognition model.
    • October 4 - 5
      • Bibliotheca Baltica conference
        • The conference took place in northern Germany at the University of Rostock (one of the READ project partners) on 4-5 October 2018.  The theme of the conference was 'Innovative technologies for Libraries, Archives and Research Communities'.  The proceedings included Transkribus workshops and a keynote lecture from Guenter Muehlberger, the coordinator of the READ project. 
    • October 15
      • Searching Jeremy Bentham's manuscripts with Keyword Spotting
        • The Bentham Project has been experimenting with the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) of Bentham's manuscripts for the past five years, first as a partner in the tranScriptorium project and now as part of READ .
    • October 18
      • Transkribus in Zagreb
        • The event was hosted by ICARUS Croatia and the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb. There was a morning of lectures from READ project researchers based at the University of Innsbruck and University College London, which explained the workings of Transkribus and the possibilities of Handwritten Text Recognition for different kinds of historical documents.
    • October 29
      • Experiments with Transkribus and early printed text
        • Annika Rockenberger from the National Library of Norway has written a blog about her experiments with Transkribus as part of her work on a digital edition of the writings of the German journalist, historian and poet Georg Greflinger (1620-1677).
    • October 30
      • Transkribus on Euronews TV
        • EuroNews TV, a leading 24-hour information channel, has produced a short documentary film featuring READ which sheds light on the latest research in Handwritten Text Recognition
    • November 2
      • More than 15,000 Transkribus users!
        • Transkribus now has more than 15,000 users!  Our users are based mainly in Europe but also extend into Africa, Australia, America and other parts of the globe.
    • November 6
      • Wandering around baroque Naples - The Pandetta project by ilCartastorie.
        • The ilCartastorie, to preserve its archive and to make it more visible through new media, started a program of digitisation using the Transkribus platform, through which all the names of bank clients, from 1573 to 1600 for each bank existing at that time will be made more accessible and searchable.
    • November 7
      • Vienna Scanathon
        • Participants had the opportunity to test out the DocScan mobile app and the ScanTent device, new tools which facilitate the digitisation of historical documents with a mobile phone. The event took place on the afternoon of Wednesday 7 November.  Attendance was free and open to all.
    • November 8 - 9
      • 2. Transkribus User Conference
        • We have returned to the beautiful city of Vienna to discuss the latest developments in Automated Text Recognition technology and the future of our Transkribus platform.  The conference was hosted once more at the Technical University Vienna on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 November 2018.
    • November 23
      • Recognising eighteenth-century legal records at Middle Temple
        • The archive and library of Middle Temple holds records of the Inn from the early sixteenth century onwards.  The most significant series of these documents are being digitised and made available online. Middle Temple began exploring Transkribus tentatively in 2016.  The Inn first signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the READ project and then started to explore the possibilities of training Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models to recognise documents in their collections.
    • November 28
      • Searching the Spanish Golden Age with Keyword Spotting
        • In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, there was a significant surge of thousands of theatrical productions. This period has become known as the Spanish Golden Age.  Thanks to a new protoype web tool, anyone can now search through 40,000 images from a significant digitised collection of manuscripts relating to this period of Spanish history.  This tool uses cutting-edge Keyword Spotting technology, allowing users to search images which have  never before been transcribed.
    • November 30
      • Preserving our cultural heritage with a smartphone
        • A typical mobile phone camera can capture relatively high-quality images of historical documents, which can then be used for preservation, research and even as training data for Automated Text Recognition using our Transkribus platform. The Computer Vision Lab at the Technical University of Vienna (one of the READ project partners) have created the ScanTent device and the DocScan mobile app to make it easier for people to digitise documents in this way.
    • December 6
      • Recognising printed Asian texts with Transkribus
        • Two projects have recently been working with nineteenth-century printed texts in Transkribus with the hope of getting better results.  Using images and transcripts from a collection, Transkribus users can train a model to recognise printed text of any type.
  • 2019
    • January 11
      • ScanTent makes it to Mali, West Africa!
        • Prototypes of the ScanTent, our device for digitising documents with a mobile phone, have been popping up all over Europe over the past year. And in December 2018, the first ScanTent made it to Africa!
    • January 23
      • Podcast with READ project coordinator
        • Günter Mühlberger, coordinator of READ and head of the Digital Humanities Research Center at the University of Innsbruck has recently been interviewed on a new podcast (in German). The interview was recorded by the NewsEye project which like READ, is funded by European Union's Horizon 2020 scheme. NewsEye aims to use digital tools to provide enhanced access to digitised historical newspapers and the project will build upon READ's existing achievements in relating to the automated recognition of printed text.
    • January 25
      • READ on the move to READ-COOP
        • The READ consortium together with several other institutions is currently preparing the foundation of a legal entity (working title: READ-COOP) which will serve as the basis for sustaining and further developing the Transkribus platform and related services.
    • January 30
      • Transkribus around the globe - coverage on TVNZ
        • Our Transkribus platform for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is used by thousands of researchers and archivists all over the world. And we've just been featured on the news on the New Zealand television network TVNZ.
    • February 20
      • Birth of the First Republic: Recognising Austrian Parliamentary papers
        • After the tumult of World War One, the First Austrian Republic was declared in September 1919. Nearly 100 years later, the Austrian Parliamentary Directorate are making documents from this crucial period of national history available online. They have recently digitised 9000 parliamentary papers from the First Republic and are working with our Transkribus platform to provide the fully-searchable text of this collection.
    • February 26
      • Transkribus featured in Italian newspaper
        • il Fatto Quotidiano, an Italian daily newspaper, recently published a summary of our huge achievements in Handwritten Text Recognition and invited readers to try out our technology.
    • March 8
      • Plant power! Results from the Royal College of Physicians' Herbarium
        • The Royal College of Physicians has been devoted to advancing medicine for the past 500 years and has amassed outstanding historical collections of rare books, medical instruments and medicinal plant specimens. The RCP has recently digitised the 6000 sheets from the (mostly) nineteenth-century Herbarium of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain.  This collection comprises thousands of preserved plant specimens and their associated labels.
    • March 13
      • 20,000 tremendous Transkribus users!
        • There are now over 20,000 registered users of our Transkribus platform for Handwritten Text Recognition! People are working with Transkribus across the globe, using it to train hundreds of models to recognise texts of diverse dates, languages and styles.
    • March 14
      • Crowdsourcing with Transkribus at Amsterdam City Archives
        • When we work together, there's so much we can achieve! Amsterdam City Archives and VeleHanden have just launched a fantastic crowdsourcing initiative which combines the power of our Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology with the talents of volunteer transcribers.
    • April 2
      • Searching more than 100 years of mountaineering history with Transkribus
        • We are proud to be part of a successful project carried out by the New Zealand Alpine Club and the University of Innsbruck (Linguistic Institute). The complete workflow was done within Transkribus: apart from uploading files and running the text recognition volunteers used the web-based transcription interface from Transkribus to carefully correct all 17,500 pages of the New Zealand Alpine Journal.
    • April 4
      • First meeting of Dutch Transkribus network
        • On 4 April 2019 Transkribus users from the Netherlands and Belgium gathered under cloudy skies in The Hague to discuss the possibility of forming a network to improve the automated recognition of Dutch language documents.
    • April 23
      • Transkribus-support for DIGITENS
        • Transkribus now helps to produce a digital encyclopaedia, containing articles regarding sociability during the Age of British enlightenment. This should be achieved within the H2020 DIGITENS-project coordinated by the University of Western Brittany (UBO) in Brest, France, which gives young scholars the chance to get familiar with new digital humanities research tools and with the work in archives. At the same time the project opens them up to the opportunity to spend time abroad and therefore supports mobility.
    • May 31
      • HTR+ reads old Slavonic documents with 3-5 % Character Error Rate
        • Recently our new HTR+ was tested on different styles of Church Slavonic handwritings by Achim Rabus, who is holding the Chair of Slavic Linguistics at the University of Freiburg in Germany. With Transkribus' technology the error rates went down to 3 to 5 percent. Superscript letters, abbreviations and word separation are the challenges the HTR+ had to deal with.
    • June 6
      • Handwritten Text Recognition at the National Archives of Finland
        • In the past 3 years research groups and archives from all over Europe were working on Handwritten Text Recognition for historical documents. Results can now be seen at the public Transkribus seminar at the National Archives of Finland in Helsinki on Wednesday 26.6.2019!
    • June 24
      • Transkribus goes America
        • In May, Barbara Denicolò from the Transkribus-Team Innsbruck and Elena Mühlbauer from the Diözesanarchiv in Passau in the name of READ travelled to the Midwest of the USA to present Transkribus to the American audience. Though small, Kalamazoo in the state of Michigan, is well-known for one of the major congresses of the various mediaeval disciplines, which takes place every year at the Western Michigan University WMU. At the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Elena and Barbara presented Transkribus as a practical tool for philologists and historians to transcribe and annotate old manuscripts and prints manually or automatically.
    • June 25
      • Foundation of READ-COOP
        • After a months-long process of research, negotiations with stakeholders, and administrative preparations by founder Günter Mühlberger, accompanied and supported by Daniel Wibmer from the Raiffeisen co-operative founding consultancy service, and Günter Scheide from the Transfer Office Science - Business - Society at the University of Innsbruck, finally the founding ceremony of READ-COOP SCE took place on 1 July, 2019. It serves as serve as the basis for sustaining and further developing the Transkribus platform and related services and tools.
    • July 30
      • Transkribus HTR competing in OCR-test of the Zurich University
        • Members of the Zurich University compared two versions of the ABBYY FineReader (FineReader XIX and FineReader Server 11) OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and the Transkribus HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) in order to find out which one is the most effective one when it comes to recognition results on black letters in historical newspapers. For the test they used PDFs with medium resolution images of the German-language Neue Zürcher Zeitung. We are happy that the experiment of the University of Zurich shows that Transkribus provides significantly better results than the commercial system ABBYY FineReader.
    • August 23
      • General model for "Fraktur" released
        • Thanks to the Library Labs of the Austrian National Library and the NewsEye project we are happy to announce the release of a free model which is capable to read German Fraktur documents especially from the 19th and 20th century in a convincing quality outperforming most standard OCR engines. The model is based on training data coming from the ANNO collection of the Austrian National Library and comprises 442.141 words. It shows a CER of 1,55% on the training set and 1,65% on the test set without any dictionary support.
    • August 23
      • Special models on Slavic handwriting released
        • Prof. Achim Rabus from the University of Freiburg has released two specialized models which are able to read Russian Curch Slavonic. The first model is called VMC_Test_4+: Training data consist of parts of the Russian Church Slavonic Great Reading Menology (16th century). The model is tailored towards transcribing Cyrillic semi-uncial script from the 16th century. Character Error Rates for the training data are 3.72% and for the validation set 3.92% and for the validation set 3.82%.
    • August 23
      • National Archives releases first version of a Dutch handwriting model
        • The digitisation team around Liesbeth Keyser from the National Archives in the Netherlands is working hard on creating training data for their collections in order to prepare HTR processing on a large scale. As a first result a model based on 475.769 words is now made available for Transkribus users. The model shows a Character Error Rate of 7.48% on the training set and 6.15% on the validation set.
    • August 26
      • 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.
    • August 27
      • Successful Transkribus Workshop at DH summer school in Tartu
        • On 27th of August Barbara Denicolò of the Transkribus Team Innsbruck held a workshop at the summer school "Digital Methods in Humanities and Social Sciences" at the University of Tartu (Estonia). An overview about different analysis methods and methodological principles for working with (digital) data in humanities and social sciences was given within the framework of this summer school. Transkribus was invited to represent the historical-paleographical part, i.e. the work with handwritten and printed text.
    • September 25
      • Paper on Transkribus and handwritten text recognition (HTR) in archives now open access
        • A general paper about Transkribus was published in the Journal of Documentation.  Transforming scholarship in the archives through handwritten text recognition gives an overview of the current use of HTR on archival manuscript material with the help of Transkribus. Several use cases are discussed and therefore the article demonstrates how HTR can affect scholarship and revolutionize the use of digitised heritage content.
    • September 26
      • Printed vs. handwritten text lines - automatically separated
        • The Transkribus team collaborates with the Pattern Recognition team of the University Erlangen-Nürnberg (also member of READ-COOP SCE) and the collegues were so great to make an interesting experiment: to train their classifier for discriminating printed and handwritten text lines automatically.
    • November 15
      • READ-COOP SCE formally established!
        • The READ-COOP SCE with limited liability is now formally established! Under the identification number FN 520187g it is registered in the Austrian company register. READ-COOP SCE will run and further develop the Transkribus platform and related services such as the ScanTent. 
  • 2020
    • January 10
      • Presenting the Noscemus-public-model
        • We are happy to present one of our public models, which is the "Noscemus GM v1"-model released by Stefan Zathammer as part of the Innsbruck based project NOSCEMUS (Nova Scientia: Early Modern Scientific Literature and Latin). This model can read texts set in Antiqua-based typefaces from the 16th, 17th and 18th century, outperforming most standard OCR engines. Although it is tailored towards transcribing (Neo-)Latin texts, it provides convincing results also for other languages such as French, Italian or English. The Noscemus model can therefore not only provide help for Neo-Latinists, but for all kinds of research dealing with big text corpora from the Early Modern Period.
    • January 14
      • Ernie O'Malley Interviews Project's about Transkribus
        • From the 1930s until 1953 one veteran of the Irish Revolution (1912-23), Ernie O'Malley, interviewed over 450 of his former comrades about their experiences. Although deposited in UCD Archives since the 1970s, those notebooks have been largely inaccessible to scholars principally because of Ernie O'Malley's impenetrable handwriting. As a result, one of the richest sources on the life and afterlife of the Irish Revolution has been underused and largely overshadowed by other accounts.
    • February 6-7
      • Transkribus User Conference 2020 - we keep transcribing as READ-COOP
        • On 6-7 February 2020 the third Transkribus User Conference took place at the Faculty of Catholic Theology in Innsbruck. 160 Transkribus users made their way to the snowy town of Innsbruck, which had been the conference's venue for the first time.
    • March 7
      • Scanathon at the University Archive Greifswald
        • We are happy to report about the Scanathon, which took place at the University of Greifswald as part of their open house day on Saturday, 7th of March 2020. The event was also connected to the German Archives Day (by the Verband deutscher Archivarinnen und Archivare) and besides the Scanathon itself, mini-workshops had been organised, giving participants the opportunity to get an insight into Transkribus.
    • April 3
      • Proudly presenting the Dutch giant
        • This is what comes out, when two Transkribus power user archives, namely the Amsterdam City Archives and the National Archives of the Netherlands work together: a model with 1 384 893 words of training data, in this case reading 18th century Dutch. The model is available to all Transkribus users now and can be found under the name: "Dutch Mountains (18th Century)". It combines the 18th Century models of the two archives (Amsterdam City Archives : 3500+ scans of 15 notarial handwritings and National Archives of the Netherlands 3500+ scans of VOC handwritings). The Character Error Rate goes down to 5,67%.
    • April 27
      • Deciphering the letters of Andrej Kmet' with the help of Transkribus
        • In the article with the title "Automated Transcription of Handwritten Text: READ and TRANSKRIBUS (An Experiment with Transcribing Letters of Andrej Kmeť)", which was published in October 2019, Dusan Katuscak describes his experience with Transkribus when working on the transcription of the handwritten letters of Andrej Kmet'. Additionally, a brief description of the Transkribus workflow (scanning with the ScanTent, image-upload, segmentation, automatic transcription) is given.
    • May 15
      • Widecombe Parish Devon UK: Investigating Local Welfare Provision
        • This project was set up to investigate the local parish records of Devon, some of which date back to the 16th century but the majority of which are 18 and 19th century. These records are largely about the raising of local taxes and then spending the money raised for the upkeep of the church and the welfare of the poor. Providing for the poor has been a legal requirement in the UK since the time of Elizabeth the First and this was managed locally long before any idea of a 'welfare state' was born. The records had been digitised (scanned and catalogued) as a result of a previous project and this way several thousand digital images with search facilities have become available.
    • July 2
      • Transkribus e le frontiere dell'analisi elettronica dei testi
        • Recently an interview on the experience with Transkribus has been publicised by the Gramsci centre for the humanities and the University of San Marino. A model for the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci has been created, Massimo Mastrogregori of the Gramsci centre for the humanities has been working on this.
    • August 28
      • More than 60 members already support the READ-COOP SCE
        • The Transkribus community keeps growing, we have passed the 40.000 users mark recently, and so does the number of READ-COOP-members. We currently have more than 60 private persons and institutions, who decided to become a co-owner of READ-COOP SCE. Apart from getting discounts on services of the READ-COOP they also have the chance to actively take part in the decision making and voting at the General Meeting. We are proud that well known institutions such as the British Library, the Trinity College Dublin, the Austrian Academy of Science and the University of Cambridge signed the contract.
    • September 15-17
      • Train the trainers in Innsbruck
    • September 18
      • Public model for Italian administrative hands
        • We are happy to present a new public model for Italian administrative hands! It was created as a collaborative effort by Jake Dyble (Exeter/Pisa), Antonio Iodice (Exeter/Genoa), Sara Mansutti (Cork), and Rachel Midura (Virginia Tech). The model "Italian Administrative Hand, 1550-1700" was trained on 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 news writers.
    • September 18
      • Entangled Histories Ordinances of the Low Countries
        • In 2019 the KB National Library of the Netherlands welcomed the Researcher-in-Residence project Entangled Histories Ordinances of the Low Countries. Within this project, Annemieke Romein, Sara Veldoen and Michel de Gruijter studied early modern legislation, regarding volumes of printed texts. Transkribus was used in this project in order to make early modern printed texts (e.g. Dutch Gothic) readable.
    • September 18
      • Try out Transkribus new recognition software PyLaia!
        • PyLaia basically requires the same workflow as HTR+. First of all, please request the PyLaia training feature via info@readcoop.eu, by dropping us a short email indicating the email address you are registered with in Transkribus. We will then enable your account for it. Afterwards PyLaia is accessible via the same "Train"-button as HTR+. You can also use the Ground Truth you have already trained with HTR+ for PyLaia, this way you can compare the results of the two trainings directly. 
    • December 3
      • Chronicling Novelty: A great crowd-sourcing project from the Netherlands
        • Two years ago, Erika Kuijpers (Amsterdam University) in collaboration with Judith Pollman (Leiden University) started the ambitious "Chronicling Novelty" project with the intention to digitize some three hundred local chronicles from the Dutch period of 1500-1850. Using the ScanTent, they photographed thousands of pages of chronicles in archives all over the Netherlands. These images were then uploaded on the VeleHanden platform, which is working together with Transkribus. With enthusiastic work of many volunteers, a great part of the pages is already transcribed and thus will become available to other researchers and interested individuals.
    • December 3
      • Finding out more about undiscovered Hanse-documents with the help of Transkribus
        • Thanks to the "Hanse.Quellen.Lesen!"-project many more documents - and especially those from the 16th and 17th century are getting more attention now. Due to the sheer amount , it would not be possible to handle the workload without the help of volunteers  and automated transcription. Therefore, the Europäische Hansemuseum Lübeck and the Forschungsstelle für die Geschichte der Hanse und des Ostseeraums (FGHO) started a citizen science project in cooperation with the Archiv der Hansestadt Lübeck (AHL) to work on the transcription with the help of volunteers and Transkribus.
    • December 16
      • Distance learning with Transkribus
        • The Europäische Hansemuseum Lübeck carried out a project with school pupils where the students worked directly on the original sources of the Hanseatic cities via the Transkribus Webinterface. The history of the Hanseatic cities is part of the curriculum in schools but original sources in teaching are rare. With the Transkribus Webinterface the pupils can browse through the historic material from home and perform tasks on the documents like searching for person's names and marking them.
  • 2021
    • January 19
      • 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.
    • January 27
      • Acta_17 - Greifswald Supercharged
        • Guess who is familiar with a thousand different writers, speaks German, Lower German and Latin and has a favour for 17th century manuscripts? That is the "Acta_17"-model created by Dirk Alvermann, Elisabeth Heigl and Anna Brandt of the University of Greifswald. Thanks to them the model is publicly available in Transkribus - feel free to try it out if it fits to your material! The training data is based on legal texts and court writings from the Responsa of the Greifswald Law Faculty and can cope with simple German and Latin abbreviations. There is an HTR+ as well as a PyLaia-version of the model and in both cases nearly 600 000 words have been trained. The Character Error Rate is about 6%.
    • February 3
      • "German_Kurrent_17th-18th" - The Kurrent Jack of all Trades
        • Already got to know one of our biggest models in Transkribus? That is the German_Kurrent_17th-18th model by the University of Greifswald. Different kinds of texts have been part of the training to do justice to its nickname "The Kurrent Jack of all Trades". Most of the trained manuscripts are part of the council minutes of the University of Greifswald, the assessor votes of the Wismar High Court, the minutes of the Pomeranian government of Stralsund, the responsa of the Greifswald Law Faculty and other archival holdings such as private letter collections. The training data primarily consists of documents from the 17th-18th century and a couple of pages from the 19th century. The model has a training set of more than 1 840 000 words (honestly!) and a Character Error Rate on the Validation Set of 5.5%.
    • February 16-18
      • Transkribus webinar for the University of Denver Libraries
        • A Transkribus webinar was done for the University of Denver Libraries on 16th and 18th of February 2021. It was open to everybody interested in taking part and dealt with Transkribus basics as well as gave an insight into more advanced features like the Text2Image matching tool. Moreover, we talked about crowd-sourcing projects with Transkribus and Transkribus web applications.
    • April 2
      • Transkribus at the municipal archive of the city of Bautzen
        • The municipal archive of the city of Bautzen holds an extensive record of official administration from the 13th century to the present day. Council minutes are part of the main archive collections of the city archive and were almost completely digitized in 2019/2020. They can be accessed online via the Findbuch.net-platform (https://www.archivverbund-bautzen.findbuch.net/php/main.php#3632313030). With Transkribus and read&search, we are hoping to contribute to improving the accessibility of the material significantly, as those are vital sources for the history of the city of Bautzen and the surrounding region.
    • July 1
      • Mastering Latin Abbreviations and Hyphenations - The Bentham and DEEDS Projects
        • A collaboration between the Bentham Project of the University College London and the DEEDS (Documents of Early England Data Set) Project of the University of Toronto uses Transkribus for the transcription of an immense corpus of medieval charters from the 12th to the 15th century. 

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