Transcribing with Transkribus

Transkribus is a means (still in development) of automating the transcription process that is typical for medievalists and historians of more recent periods. Anything that is a manuscript or is handwritten remains difficult for computer-assisted reading software, but images of handwriting are being used (by Transkribus and other projects) to train computers to assist in this process. Whether you're a historian or an archivist seeking to crowd-source transcriptions, Transkribus can help you.

To get a sense of the first steps in using Transkribus follow their How to Use Transkribus guide.

Take a look at the panel on the left-hand side and click Login. Use your Transkribus credentials (Email address and password).

Note: Prior to this step you must give your username (the email you signed up with) to Marc so that you can be added to the collection. Otherwise when you login there will be no documents to view.

You should now be logged in. To access this course's collection, click on Collections and select the collection named "Ottawa, ARC, Carleton University, Medieval Folios". What will appear is a list of the folios uploaded to this collection.

Double-click on your folio to open it. Depending on your computer and the size of the scan, this could take a few seconds.

Once your document is ready, navigate to the Tools tab. With Current Transcript, Find Text Regions, and Find Lines in Text Regions selected, hit Run. This process will take a few moments. When eventually prompted, refresh the image and you will see that Transkribus has generated a text space or text spaces (green) for you. Within this text space are also lines (blue). You may begin transcribing now by selecting a line.