Citizens begin search for written sources on Hansa ship

Today, the archive and the archaeology and heritage management department of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck launched a unique collaboration with the Research Centre for the History of the Hanseatic League and the Baltic Region (Forschungsstelle für die Geschichte der Hanse und des Ostseeraums ­ –FGHO). As part of the FGHO's Citizen Science project, the Hansa ship, built in the early 1640s, is now also to be examined on the basis of written sources. The FGHO, which is integrated into the European Hanse Museum, is contributing its expertise in the digital indexing of historical documents.

To this end, citizens participating in the project read original written sources from the time of the ship and transcribe them. The rewriting is done in a software that is thereby trained on the fonts of the 17th century – the so-called machine learning. This not only makes the old texts legible, but also enables AI-supported transcription in the future.

The basis for this research is, on the one hand, the discovery of the source group of the Lübeck Maritime Court. Between 1655 and 1670, this court heard all shipping-related disputes in the Lübeck area. On the other hand, the advanced archaeological analysis of the ship. In addition to the location of the sinking, the cause, a large fire, and the exact period of sinking in the late 1650s are now known. This provides the citizen scientists with concrete clues for their search.

Would you like to get involved yourself? Contact details and further information can be found here: https://fgho.eu/de/projekte/hanse-quellen-lesen

Photo: I. Lange (FGHO).