Transkribus Platform

It's not every day a digital humanities project receives an award presented by Queen Mary of Denmark!

Congratulations to Professor Johan Heinsen and his team at Aalborg University - their project, Enevældens Nyheder Online, was recently awarded the prestigious "Original Idea of the Year" award by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

Johan Heinsen’s research tackles a fascinating question: How did the modern state tighten its control over citizens between 1750 and 1850? To find out, his team turned to an enormous archive of historical newspapers to track over 15,000 runaway notices and early crime reports.

Manually searching through half a million pages of old news was impossible for a small team. To make matters worse, traditional methods struggled reading the historical documents, resulting in an error rate too high to be useful for keyword searches.

Using Transkribus, the team trained custom models to handle complex newspaper layouts and recognise historical Danish. This brought the error rate down below 1%, making the entire collection searchable for the first time.
The result is a completely open database that allows researchers and the public to explore hundreds of thousands of pages of history..

We are incredibly proud to see Transkribus used as the foundation for this award-winning work, and we want to thank Johan and his team for sharing their journey with our community!

👉 Read the full award-winning story on our blog:
https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0vSMcJ0

👉 Visit the Enevældens Nyheder Online project website:
https://hislab.quarto.pub/

Enevældens Nyheder Online: An award-winning project to create digital versions of historical newspapers | Transkribus Blog Explore how Professor Johan Heinsen's award-winning research on social control in Denmark transformed digital humanities through historical newspaper digitisation.

What can Visual Language Models (not) do for document analysis?

There’s no shortage of new AI tools promising to instantly read text, layouts, and visual structures all at once. But when you apply them to complex historical documents, how do they actually perform?

At the Transkribus User Conference 2026, we are going to focus on what actually holds up in practice.

"What Visual Language Models Can (Not) Do for Document Analysis" serves as both the title and the core of Vincent Christlein’s keynote speech, which will kick off our Tuesday sessions at this year's Transkribus User Conference!

As head of the Computer Vision group at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Vincent Christlein will explore where lightweight and open models excel and where they fall short. He will discuss recent work on structured OCR, information extraction, and document translation to explain why massive end-to-end AI systems might not be the answer, but hybrid pipelines are.

🗓️ Date: 22 September 2026
📍 Location: University of Passau
🔑 Keynote: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0vG54p0

👉 Take a look at the full programme and join us to explore these questions in more detail: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0vG5hB0

Many researchers and archivists run into the same problem: ambitious project goals, strict deadlines, and simply not enough hands to do the work.

The team at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library faced exactly this during the Finding Their Names project, which aims to identify and document enslaved individuals mentioned across irregular, handwritten Colonial and Antebellum-era records. The team had to work with scattered documents, strict digital standards, and a very limited timeline. Doing all of this manual processing alone simply wasn’t realistic.

Instead of tackling the massive collection page-by-page, they combined Transkribus with custom scripting workflows. This allowed just two people to generate searchable transcripts and structured text for more than 20,000 pages in under two months.

And, more importantly, the project established a smart workflow that the team can continue using for any future transcription project.

Find out how the right digital tools can help small teams bypass the manual work and make large historical collections far more accessible for research. 👇

Sustainable efficiency: How the University of Georgia transcribed 20,000 pages in two months | Transkribus Blog Discover how the University of Georgia's innovative project transcribed 20,000 pages of historical documents in just two months, enhancing access to enslaved individuals' stories.

History isn’t always about grand narratives; sometimes it's about contraband rhubarb and 17th-century curiosities.

While AI is evolving fast, many general tools still struggle with anything outside of standard English, such as historical German scripts like Kurrent, Sütterlin, and Fraktur. Working with these sources requires models that have been specifically trained for archival material.

Here are three projects where researchers are using Transkribus to get historical German-language collections online:

1️⃣ Scale: The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin transcribed 250,000 handwritten specimen labels, turning millions of data points into a searchable global resource.
2️⃣ Community: The German Archives for Diaries uses a citizen science approach, allowing volunteers to transcribe 27,000 personal diaries and preserve stories from past generations.
3️⃣ Reach: At Latvijas Nacionālais arhīvs, researcher Mairita Lukianska digitised 263,000 pages of Riga’s City Council minutes, a reminder that German-language heritage isn't limited to Germany, and it’s full of surprises (like 17th-century rhubarb crackdowns).

From illegally imported rhubarb to millions of museum specimens, these projects show that with Transkribus, historical German script is no longer a barrier.

👉 Read the full breakdown of these three projects on our blog:

AI Made for German: Unlocking German-language archives with Transkribus | Transkribus Blog Discover how Transkribus is revolutionising access to historical German-language documents, transforming archives into searchable digital resources for all.