What you find here and what you don’t

This blog mainly reports about our work with Transkribus. In addition, we also present the project workflow and our experience with the scanning processes, the applied parameters, the creation of structural and metadata and the presentation of the project results in the Viewer of the Digital Library Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

This blog is not a manual. So don’t expect us to give step-by-step instructions for individual tasks that can be done in Transkribus (although we sometimes do). But there are a lot of good and proven How-To’s, which the Transkribus team and users have developed over the past years. Here you can read about practical experiences and some tips & tricks.

Transkribus now has two interfaces: the “Expert Client”, which you can download here, and the Web User Interface (WebUI), which you can reach at this address. This blog is almost exclusively about the Expert Client, because it provides the full functionality needed to handle challenging projects. Under which circumstances and why the use of the WebUI is nevertheless useful and appropriate, we explain here .

Our experiences are based on a medium-sized large-scale-project. Here approx. 250,000 images are processed. Our focus is accordingly aligned. We use the possibilities of Transkribus to open up large quantities of documents through handwritten text recognition (HTR), to enrich them with content and to make them available online. Searchability is to be made possible by means of full text search or keyword spotting (KWS). The type of methods used and the demands placed on the results are aligned to this goal. Projects on a smaller scale may use differentiated and more subtle methods; nevertheless, there are some useful experiences for them as well.

Tips & Tools
Recommendation for further reading: Günter Mühlberger, Tamara Terbul: Handschriftenerkennung für historische Schriften. Die Transkribus Plattform