Machine-assisted Transcription for Handwritten Gaelic Narratives

This project will convert a 500k-word sample of narrative documents to digital text and train the first automatic handwriting recogniser for the Gaelic language, using the Transkribus platform (https://transkribus.eu/Transkribus/). This will provide the foundation for an ambitious future research programme, which will develop novel language technologies for Gaelic and Scots, and innovative ways of researching traditional narrative through these technologies. Once finalised, the Gaelic handwriting recogniser will be made available worldwide, to the benefit of numerous end users, and the study will be documented in a blog and peer-reviewed publication.