Manuscripts are essential sources for many fields of study and various interests. Therefore, their transcriptions are invaluable research data. However, transcriptions are rarely published and often remain unavailable to the public.
The crowdsourcing platform transcriptiones aims to prevent multiple transcription work of the same source and to show this work the necessary appreciation.
transcriptiones is open for anyone. We explicitly welcome all transcriptions of historical manuscripts – regardless of the archive or the degree of completion.
The transcriptions and metadata that have already been uploaded can be edited and expanded by the original contributor or by other users.
You can find more information on how to use transcriptiones here. Frequently asked questions can be found here.
transcriptiones was initiated in 2020 by Yvonne Fuchs and Dominic Weber, then master students of history at the University of Basel. The prototype was developed during a fellowship at the ETH Library Lab.
Thanks to generous funding from the Fonds zur Förderung von Lehre und Forschung at the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft Basel (FAG), the Max Geldner-Stiftung and the Dr. H. A. Vögelin-Bienz-Stiftung the database could be expanded and finalised. In this phase, transcriptiones moved to the Departement of History at the University of Basel and has since been affiliated with the chair of Prof. Dr. Lucas Burkart.
Exceptional thanks are due to Prof. Dr. Lucas Burkart, who has mentored and supported the team from the earliest phase of the project and has facilitated our efforts in collecting funds and negotiating a long-term institutional affiliation.
Thanks to Maximiliane Okonnek and the entire ETH Library Lab team, we were able to develop a prototype which laid the foundation for the further phases of the project. We would like to thank Prof. Dr. Tobias Hodel for his academic supervision and valuable feedback. Dr. Christiane Sibille has paved the way for the development of transcriptiones with her motivating words and by pointing out to us the ETH Library Lab Innovator Fellowship program.
We are also truly grateful to Sorin Marti, who did most of the programming work and has contributed significantly to the successful development of the platform. We would also like to thank Nicolas Diener and Daniele Roncaglioni (Propulsion Academy), who supported us with programming and technical issues during the prototyping phase.
We were able to have great conversations with many other people and to receive interesting and valuable inputs from various people. Thank you for your support! We would like to thank these and all other supporters from the bottom of our !
Idea, concept, project management: Yvonne Fuchs, Dominic Weber
Editor: Prof. Dr. Lucas Burkart
Academic supervision: Prof. Dr. Lucas Burkart, Prof. Dr. Tobias Hodel
Development: Sorin Marti
Prototype development: Yvonne Fuchs, Dominic Weber, Nicolas Diener, Daniele Roncaglioni
Translations: Louis Vogel (en)
Project partners: Department of History at University of Basel, ETH Library Lab
Funding: Fonds zur Förderung von Lehre und Forschung at the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft Basel (FAG), Max Geldner-Stiftung, Dr. H. A. Vögelin-Bienz-Stiftung
University of Basel
Departement of History, c/o transcriptiones
Hirschgässlein 21
CH-4051 Basel