Exploring the late period of the Hanseatic League together
What began as a classic pandemic project in 2020 has now become an integral part of the FGHO's work. In cooperation with the archives of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck, we invite you to participate in our citizen science project by transcribing historical documents on Hanseatic history from the 16th and 17th centuries, i. e. converting them into a form that is readable today.
How can I participate?
If you are interested in participating or would simply like to try your hand at transcribing, just send us an email at info [at] fgho.eu.
You will receive further information without obligation and gain an insight into working with historical sources. From clean copies of documents to tricky cases, we have the right document for everyone.
Transcribing – Tips & Links
- Transkribus Tutorial (PDF, German): How to use Transkribus within our project
- Transcription guidelines (PDF, German): In order to achieve consistent results in the transcriptions, there are guidelines. We ask new users to read them carefully before starting the project.
Useful Knowledge
(mostly in German)
- Introductory literature on the history of the Hanseatic League (PDF), partly in English
- Transcription exercises by Ad Fontes
- Sample alphabet for 16th century writing (PDF)
- Sample letters for 17th century Hanse documents (PDF)
- List of common abbreviations used in the Middle Ages and Early modern period (PDF), © Greifswald University, project ‘Rechtsprechung im Ostseeraum’
New research together: Hanse sources and Transkribus
We want to explore with you the late period of Hanseatic history, for which most of the sources have not yet been edited or otherwise published. The series ‘Hanserezesse,’ a compilation of sources on Hanseatic history, ends in 1537 – partly because the material to be processed became too extensive.
In the first two rounds of ‘Read!Hanse.Sources.’ (April 2020 to March 2022), we were able to transcribe more than 1,500 pages from the 16th and 17th centuries. For ‘Read!Hanse.Sources. 3.0,’ we are tackling the 17th century. This time, we have prepared 16 documents with over 700 pages, ranging from beginner-friendly fair copies with clear typefaces (‘Rezess der Versammlung der neun Hansestädte 1612’) to more challenging documents for advanced users (‘Rezess der sechs korrespondierenden Hansestädte 1618’).
The Transkribus software was developed as a tool for transcribing manuscripts with the aim of creating automated text recognition based on the transcriptions. This requires a sufficient amount of transcribed text (from comparable manuscripts). This is used to train a so-called ‘manuscript model’, i. e. to teach Transkribus to automatically transcribe this specific script. At the FGHO, we are testing the programme in our Hanseatic Resolutions project.
The project results are published under a CC-BY licence (4.0) on a read&search page so that they can be freely used and accessed by academics and the general public.
