Voluntary help and AI

Voluntaries and AI

The foundation for further use of the archival material is, of course, the digitization, which makes it accessible to everyone. However, the old Gothic handwriting in Danish will pose a significant obstacle for many, especially English-speaking people, who are unfamiliar with both the Gothic script and the Danish language.

That is why we are also experimenting with artificial intelligence to read the old handwriting and convert it into printed letters, thereby also making it possible to search the material. The program Transkribus has been in use for several years now and shows good results. But the quality of the output depends on the machine being “fed” with transcribed text to gradually reduce the error rate.

Therefore, we are looking for volunteers to help transcribe texts from the digitized material.

The task will involve reviewing the machine-read text, which then will be uploaded to Transkribus and put on the website of The National Archives of Denmark.

If you are reading this and think it might be interesting to try, we would love to hear from you.

Asbjørn og former Territorial Archivist USVI    Former librarian USVI Beverly Smith                 Former director of Division of Libraries,            Asbjørn and art photographer and          Susan Lugo                                                                                                                                                     Archives and Museums                                         electro engineer Ama Dennis