MarineLives is a digital volunteering project, focusing on the transcription and enrichment of digitised manuscripts from the English High Court of Admiralty, 1627 to 1677. The initiative is developing a collaboration with the READ project and Transkribus, as part of its drive to use new technologies to facilitate historical research.
MarineLives is aiming to produce a sizeable dataset of transcribed pages, in order to train a model to adequately recognise secretarial hand from the seventeenth century. Transcription work has already started and it is hoped that online and student volunteers will be mobilised to help produce training data in Transkribus.
With this aim in mind, MarineLives would like to create an interest group of Transkribus users working on the following:
- legal documents
- notarial hands/legal hands
- secretarial hands from 16th & 17th century (with a focus on 17th)
- in any language (especially Latin, English, Dutch, German, French and Spanish)
This group can share tips for creating training data and pool information about the strengths and weaknesses of the automatic recognition of these kinds of documents. If you would like to join this interest group, please contact Colin Greenstreet of MarineLives.