GPP & Transkribus
Transcription of the Georgian Papers Programme (GPP) materials is an enormous undertaking. Early on in the Programme we realized that a project of this scope, with such a wide range of documents, cannot be approached using only one transcription method. To tackle this issue, we have chosen two methods for transcription: traditional, manual crowdsource transcription (this website), and an Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Layout Analysis tool, Transkribus, developed out of the READ-COOP SCE
Transkribus - Handwritten Text Recognition
Georgian Papers collections that span volumes or are complex tabular manuscripts are perfect canadidates for HTR tools, such as Transkribus.
What is HTR? Basically, what this means is Transkribus is able to automatically read the eighteenth century handwriting and produce a plain text document that can be used in a variety of ways.
What is tabular data? It is a term that describes materials with ledger or list type layouts. To use a modern term - spreadsheets.
Select GPP collections are being managed by a team of library professionals and student transcribers at William & Mary using Transkribus.
NEH Grant
In 2019, William & Mary was awarded a grant by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities to support a collaborative project between the University’s libraries and computer science department to improve the capabilities of Transkribus to process tabular data. The grant, "Transkribus and Georgian Papers Programme Tabular‐Formatted Manuscripts" is focused on HTR and export of data into spreadsheet formats.
Georgian Papers collections selected so far for Transkribus transcription include:
- Papers of Caroline, Queen Consort to George II
Tabular Data:
- Georgian Mensils
- Georgian Menu Books
- George II Financial Papers
- Georgian inventories in the Royal Library
