The humanities and cultural sciences traditionally decipher their centuries-old sources, which libraries, archives and museums preserve as institutions of memory, using methods and findings from the basic historical sciences, such as palaeography. One result of the digital transformation that has led to the digitisation of written cultural heritage since the beginning of the 2nd millennium is the development and use of AI-supported technologies for the automatic transcription of digitised sources.
While HTR (handwritten text recognition) is aimed at the transcription of manuscripts, OCR (optical character recognition) focuses on the transcription of printed documents. Various programmes are currently being developed, among which Transkribus for HTR and Tesseract for OCR are already achieving good results.
In Baden-Württemberg, the OCR-BW competence centre at the University Libraries of Mannheim and Tübingen pools expertise in the field of AI-supported text recognition, and Freiburg University Library cooperates with OCR-BW and holds shares in the cooperative that is developing Transkribus. If Transkribus credits are required for research or teaching projects for which third-party funding is applied for, special conditions from membership of the University Library can be claimed.
The University Library offers a limited amount of free Transkribus credits for research and teaching projects funded by the Digital Humanities Lab at the Faculty of Philology. If you would like to make use of these credits, please complete the following form. After a brief review of your application, the requested credits will be credited to your Transkribus account.
