From Digitised Pages to Reusable Texts: A Wikisource and Transkribus Training School for Digital Humanities

The programme responds to a growing need for practical and sustainable ways of working with historical texts and dictionaries. It presents Wikisource not only as a transcription free and open-access platform, but also as a useful environment for research, teaching, and public engagement. Beyond powerful OCR models, Wikisource fully integrates the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tool Transkribus, which has an agreement with Wikimedia to provide free access within the Wikimedia ecosystem.

A special feature of the school is its focus on dictionaries and other documentary heritage, especially in Portuguese, Latin, and other European languages. Participants will take part in hands-on activities such as transcription, proofreading, text structuring, editorial practice, metadata work, and examples of reuse for corpora and dictionaries.

By the end of the school, participants will know how to transcribe and proofread texts in Wikisource, use basic editorial and metadata methods, understand how Wikisource can support research and teaching, and plan small reuse projects for cultural heritage and dictionary materials. Participants will also learn how to integrate citizen-science elements around Wikisource projects, turning transcription and proofreading into welcoming public-engagement activities that create real scholarly value.

This event is supported from DARIAH-EU.