Read.Hanse.Sources!
Getting to know the later Hanse sources together!
If you’re interested in the Hanse History, this digital offer is for you! Our Citizen Science project »Read.Hanse.Sources!« has been running since April 2020 and invites you all to transcribe manuscripts from the Hanseatic period. In cooperation with the archive of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck, we have prepared documents on Hanseatic history of the 16th and 17th centuries for you and made them available online. On this page you will find all information about the project and how to participate.
How can I participate?
Login via: https://transkribus.eu/lite/de
Username: hansequellen@gmail.com
Password: Hanse24/7
...or via your own account (you can register HERE)
Select »My Collections« on the start page. Open the project »Hanse.Quellen.Lesen! Die Spätzeit der Hanse gemeinsam entdecken«. Select a document from the list and off you go!
!!! Important !!!
We reach to obtain a consistant result in the transcriptions with the use of transcription-guidelines (only in German). We ask new users to cunsolt these before staring the project.
Transcribing - Tips & Links
Technical How-To:
- Tutorial for the use of Transkribus within the framework of our project
- Discussion platform: Here tricky problems can be solves together
Reading historical handwritten documents:
- Transcription exercises on the Ad Fontes website
- Sample alphabet for 16th century writing
- Sample letters for 17th century Hanse documents
- List of common abbreviations of the Middle Ages and Early Modern times (© Projekt Rechtsprechung im Ostseeraum)
New research together - Hanse sources and Transkribus
Together with you, we strive to discover the later times of the Hanse. For these later times, large parts of the sources haven't been published yet. The »Hanserecesse«, a collection of sources regarding the history of the Hanse, only contains documents until 1537 - from then on, the material became too abundant.
In our first two rounds of »Read.Hanse.Sources!«, which ran from April 2020 to March 2022, we were able to transcribe more than 1.500 pages of source material from the 16th and 17th century. In the current »Read.Hanse.Sources! 3.0«, we are working on documents from the 17th century. This time, we made sixteen documents with more then 700 pages available. They range from beginner-friendly, easily readable pages (»Rezess der Versammlung der neun Hansestädte 1612«) to more trickier documents for more advanced transcribers (»Rezess der sechs korrespondierenden Hansestädte 1618«).
The software we use, »Transkribus«, was developed as a tool for the transcription of manuscripts with the aim of creating automated text recognition models based on the transcriptions. For this, a sufficient amount of transcribed text (from comparable manuscripts) must be available. This is used to train a so-called »handwriting model«, i.e. to teach »Transkribus« to automatically transcribe this particular script. At FGHO, we are testing this programme in our project »Records of Low German Urban Diets«.
The results of our previous »Read.Hanse.Sources!« are published under CC-BY licence on our read&search site.
