The Digital Revolution in Slavic Manuscript Studies: HTR Technology and its Impact on Philological Research

The paper highlights the recent advances of computer-assisted manuscript transcription using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) programs such as Transkribus. Numerous examples showing the capabilities of current HTR models with respect to different Slavic scripts and handwriting styles are presented and ways to use automatically transcribed sources for multiple purposes are discussed. We demonstrate that the transcription quality is stable throughout an entire document and that researchers can gauge the quality of their HTR transcription based on a limited number of pages. Afterwards, a calculation is conducted showing that the use of HTR as an instrument of pre-transcribing manuscripts and printings makes the overall process of transcribing significantly cheaper, thus making projects possible that could not be conducted without HTR technology due to financial reasons. The paper is concluded with an appeal to share training data and make ample use of these new advancements in HTR.