+ New collaboration between public and archives in Finland

The National Archives of Finland has started working with members of the public to train Handwritten Text Recognition technology to process a significant set of nineteenth-century court documents.

The archives organised a workshop in June 2017 to teach Finnish family historians from the Genealogical Society of Finland how to transcribe handwritten material in our Transkribus platform.  Since the workshop, these volunteers have continued to work on nineteenth-century court records from the cities of Porvoo and Jyväskylä, the former written entirely in Swedish, the latter written in both Swedish and Finnish.

About 120 pages have been transcribed so far and this number is rising steadily.  There are almost 20 genealogists actively transcribing, which is more than expected!  The aim of the project is to use this transcribed material to create a Handwritten Text Recognition model capable of reading these records.  Both the National Archives of Finland and the family historians are looking forward to seeing the results!