Success Story
Research
17th century
Maritime history is a field that explores humanity's relationship with the oceans, seas, and waterways of the world. While ships and naval battles are the focus of some maritime historians, others focus on global trade, migration, technological innovation, and the vast cultural exchanges that have shaped modern society.
Researching these different historical concepts often involves the use of handwritten documents, such as logbooks, shipping ledgers, court records, and even the personal letters of sailors. These documents can be a rich source of information for historians. However, accessing and digitising them can be a challenge. Not only are the fragile documents often hidden away in distant archives, but deciphering the old handwriting by hand can take months of work, before the historical analysis can even begin.
Digitising these records is therefore not just a matter of preservation, but a important step towards making this global heritage easy for historians to access, search, and share with colleagues around the world, aiding both efficiency and collaboration. In this post, we will take a look at three maritime history research projects that used Transkribus to digitise their resources and open up their documents for the benefit of everyone.
Unlocking the archives of empire: The New Spain Fleets project
The "New Spain Fleets" project, based at Lancaster University, is an ambitious initiative that uses artificial intelligence to analyse three centuries of socioeconomic history. The project focuses on the Spanish fleets that sailed between the Americas and Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries. These fleets were the lifeblood of the Spanish Empire, transporting not only vast quantities of silver and other resources, but also people, ideas, and knowledge, effectively marking the start the modern globalised world. The immense amount of documentation they left behind—from ship registers to passenger lists—offers a unique window into this transformative period of history.
By creating an extensive digital collection of these documents from two major archives, the project is making this information accessible to a global audience of researchers for the first time. Using innovative computational methods, the project is semi-automatically transcribing thousands of documents, unlocking a wealth of information that would have taken generations of scholars to process manually. The ultimate aim is to create a powerful online platform that allows researchers to explore, query, and analyse this data in new and exciting ways, leading to fresh insights into the social, economic, and scientific revolutions that were facilitated by the fleets of New Spain.
Read more about the New Spain Fleets project on their website.
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A captured past: Transcribing the Dutch Prize Papers
Between the 17th and 19th centuries, thousands of ships from around the world were captured by the British and their contents were seized. The vast collection of multilingual documents taken from these ships is known as the Prize Papers and it contains everything from official ship logs and cargo lists to intensely personal letters, diaries, and notebooks, providing an exceptionally detailed snapshot of daily life, global trade, and the connections between people across the oceans. As part of an international effort to make this collection accessible, the Huygens Institute decided to focus on the significant number of Dutch-language documents within the Prize Papers.
The sheer scale and linguistic diversity of the archive, combined with the challenging 17th and 18th-century handwriting, has long made large-scale analysis of these documents nearly impossible. To overcome this, the team at the Huygens Institute embraced AI. Using Transkribus, they trained a bespoke AI model capable of reading and transcribing the difficult historical Dutch script found throughout the collection. This work systematically converted a mountain of inaccessible paper into a searchable digital resource, allowing researchers to ask new questions about social networks, material culture, and the lives of ordinary people during the age of sail.
Read more about the Prize Papers in this Success Story.
Decoding the Hanse: Citizen scientists transcribe Lübeck’s history
The Hanseatic League was a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns that dominated trade in Northern Europe for centuries. While its golden age is well-documented, the later period of the Hanse in the 16th and 17th centuries is much less understood, with vast quantities of source material lying untranscribed in archives. To shed light on this crucial era, the European Hansemuseum, in cooperation with the Archive of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck, launched "Hanse. Quellen. Lesen!" ("Read. Hanse. Sources!"), a project to make these invaluable historical documents accessible for the first time.
At the heart of this initiative is a dedicated team of volunteers. Using citizen science, the project invites members of the public to become historical researchers and transcribe hundreds of pages of complex, handwritten documents using Transkribus, from the minutes of meetings to official correspondence. This collaborative effort is not only preserving a vital part of Europe's mercantile past but also creating a rich, searchable digital archive that will enable new research into the final chapters of this powerful medieval and early modern trading alliance.
Read more about the Hanse.Quelle.Lesen! project on their website.
Changing the tide of historical research
Ultimately, the challenge of maritime history has always been one of scale and accessibility. The stories of global trade, cultural exchange, and individual lives are vast, but until now, they have been locked away in the difficult script of archival documents. As the "New Spain Fleets", "Prize Papers", and "Hanse. Quellen. Lesen!" projects powerfully illustrate, AI transcription is changing the tide. By transforming inaccessible manuscripts into searchable data, tools like Transkribus are empowering researchers—and even the public—to explore our collective maritime past quicker and more easily than ever before, and unlock new stories and perspectives on this interesting aspect of human history.
Interested in using Transkribus for your next research project? Get in contact with us today to find out how AI can help you achieve your research aims.
