Knowing what you want

A digitization project with Handwritten Text Recognition can have very different goals. They can range from the critical digital edition to the provision of manuscripts as full texts to the indexing of large text corpora via Key Word Spotting. All three objectives allow different approaches, which have a great influence on the technical and personnel efforts.

In this project, only the last two target definitions are of interest.  A critical edition is not intended, even if the full texts generated in this project could serve as the basis of such.

We aim at a complete indexing of the manuscripts by automatic text recognition. The results will then be made public online in the Digital Library Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. A search is available there, which shows the hits in the image itself. The user, who has sufficient palaeographic knowledge, can explore the context of the hit in the image himself or switch to a modern full text view, or even only use the latter.