Communication and Language in the Empire. The Letter Books (Briefbücher) of Nuremberg in the 15th Century: Automatic Handwriting Recognition - Historical and Linguistic Analysis

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Peter Fleischmann; Professorin Dr. Mechthild Habermann; Professor Dr. Klaus Herbers; Professor Dr.-Ing. Andreas Maier
• Subject Area: Medieval History ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 416910787

The present proposal is a continuation of the DFG project on the Nuremberg missive books and their importance for communication and language in the late medieval empire, which was approved in 2019. In this interdisciplinary project, historians, linguists, and computer scientists investigate (1) the importance of the imperial city of Nuremberg for the exchange of information in the late medieval empire and (2) the relevance of the city's chancellery for the development of New High German written language. For this purpose, (3) a hybrid edition of the missive books - the copial tradition of almost all outgoing letters of the ruling Small Council - from 1408 to 1423 (with a total of 844 folia) will be produced. For successful implementation, (4) automatic handwritten text recognition will be further developed with writer information and naive human transcriptions. The results (transcriptions, writers etc.) and products (code) will be published open-access or open-source and thus be available for future projects. The requested continuation ensures the finalisation of the edition of volume 5 (1419–1423), which is central to the series, as well as the publication of volumes 3 (1410–1412) and 4 (1414–1416). In addition, from a historical perspective, the studies on the variety of topics and contact partners of the missive books as a reflection of the imperial-city's communication network are completed. Linguistics is concluding the analyses on the early supra-regionality of the Nuremberg written language on the basis of a phonological-graphemic annotation. In cooperation with the historians, the evaluation of addressee-relatedness and formulaicity of the missive books is finalized using socio- and textlinguistic criteria. The pattern recognition lab is dedicated to the further optimisation of automatic handwritten text recognition using simultaneously computed document information in order to considerably improve and accelerate future transcription processes. In addition, further objectives are being pursued which arose from the project work and consolidate the previous goals: Here, (1) a digital addressee register of the subsequent volumes (up to 1441) will be created by the historians in close cooperation with the pattern recognition lab, (2) linguistics will investigate revisions in the missive books as clues to text genesis, and (3) the pattern recognition lab will optimise automatic handwritten text recognition using synthetic data. Besides, the continuation ensures completion and publication of the four dissertation projects in progress.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Dr.-Ing. Vincent Christlein; Dr. Thorsten Schlauwitz