Digitising (Romanian) Cyrillic using Transkribus: new perspectives
Affiliations
1Merton College, University of Oxford, Merton St., OX1 4JD Oxford, United Kingdom
2Department of Slavic Studies, University of Freiburg, Werthmannstr. 14, 79085 Freiburg, Germany
History
Received September 17, 2021
Accepted September 26, 2021
Published December 12, 2021
Abstract
In this paper we discuss the application of the software platform Transkribus (transkribus.eu), an AI-assisted tool for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), to 16th century Romanian manuscript and printed sources using Cyrillic scripts. After an overview of the basic functionality of the HTR technology and Transkribus, we discuss the Romanian and bilingual Slavonic-Romanian sources we used, give an insight on training specific and generic as well as smart (i.e. transliterating from Cyrillic into Latin script) models, evaluate their performance and discuss implications of HTR for philological research in the Digital Age. We conclude with an outlook on future research perspectives.
Copyright
© 2021 The Authors. Publishing rights belong to the Journal. The article is freely accessible under the terms and conditions of the CC-BY Open Access licence.