Open-source software developed in Austria
To decipher the historical manuscripts, Dicaire-Leduc used Transkribus, an open-source software program developed by a team from the University of Innsbruck, in Austria. It scans photos of manuscripts and then automatically transcribes the handwritten text appearing on them. It also allows users to share documents and run exhaustive searches on several hundreds of thousands of pages, which are subsequently archived.
"After you take a high-resolution digital image of an archival document and upload it to Transkribus, the software generates language models using learning algorithms that scan the text, identify recurring words and turns of phrase, and ultimately decipher the message," explained Dicaire-Leduc.
The challenge with the Baby Collection's N Series was that the documents covered a wide range of subjects and were written by different authors during different time periods.
"This series runs the gamut from court decisions to land concessions, demographic observations and merchandise purchase orders," the researcher said. "The automated transcriptions generated by Transkribus contained some errors, so I had to make corrections so that the documents would be easier to read and index."
