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Danish Neo-Latin Literature: digitizing the Latin cultural heritage of Denmark from the years 1482-1600

Profiting from a recently developed OCR-technique, this project will digitize the Danish literature written in Latin and printed between 1482-1600, and subsequently make the texts available through the Royal Library and the Society for Danish Language and Literature.

It has hitherto not been possible to OCR early printed books with existing tools, but this has changed with the program OCR4all which was developed by a research group at Würzburg University for the OCR-scanning of incunables. As a result, large-scale digitizing of early modern prints is made possible for the first time ever. This project will use OCR4all on a large Danish material that is crucial for our knowledge of Danish culture during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

PI on the project is prof. Marianne Pade, and it is an eScience pilot project at the National Cultural Heritage Cluster, the Royal Library and part of the Semper-Ardens project Cultural Encounter as a Precondition for European Identity , funded by the Carlsbergfoundation. For more information about the project, click here.