Entangled Histories — Books of Ordinances of the Low Countries (1500–1800)

The KB Researcher-in-Residence programme allowed for an intensive, half-year engagement with the National Library’s collection of Low Countries’ ordinance books — plakkaatboeken — between roughly 1500 and 1800. The output was a published dataset (107 books, with HTR transcriptions and provisional segmentation), three Public Models on Transkribus (Dutch_Gothic_Print, Dutch_Romantype_Print, French_18thC_print), and a series of three blog posts on the KB Lab site.

The project was, in effect, the proof-of-concept that a HTR-and-segmentation pipeline could be applied at corpus scale to printed normative texts of the early modern Low Countries. It fed directly into the Game of Thrones Veni project, into the RHONDA classification work, and into the Datafication of Early Modern Ordinances article published in the DHBenelux proceedings.