+ New project working with Transkribus – the Imperial Library in Vienna

An exciting new project that will work intensively with Transkribus has just launched, thanks to funding from the Austrian Science Fund. 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 focuses on the correspondence of Sebastian Tengnagel, a librarian at the Imperial Library in Vienna. It 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.

Professor Thomas Wallnig and Dr Chiara Petrolini have already been working with Transkribus to process some of Tengnagel’s letters and have succeeded in producing a model that can recognise some of his writing with a Character Error Rate (CER) of around 5%.  Take a look at Dr Petrolini’s User Report from 2017 for more information.

This new project will focus on developing understanding of the political role of the Imperial Library and the wider context of the importance of the idea of the Orient in the Republic of Letters.  With regards to the project’s use of Transkribus, the researchers are particularly interest in the selective tagging and annotation of information in Tengnagel’s papers.

We look forward to seeing how this collaboration develops!