RA-Data-Science/DiEm_HTR-Numbers

Dataset Card for DiEm HTR Numbers

The DiEm HTR Numbers dataset is a ground truth dataset consisting of numbers written in historical danish handwriting from the 18th century, generated as part of the Digitalisering af Enesteministerialbøger project at the Danish National Archives.

Dataset Details

Dataset Description

The Digitalisering af Enesteministerialbøger project (DiEm) at the Danish National Archives aims to transcribe and make publically available all of the danish parish registers from before the 1813-reform by using the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) platform Transkribus. To this end, ground truth training data for the HTR-models have been created, which we now make publically available through Hugging Face in the dataset DiEm HTR. In order to make our HTR-models better at recognizing numbers, we created 298 extra pages of ground truth only consisting of numbers from the same period, which is available here in the DiEm HTR Numbers dataset.

The DiEm HTR Numbers dataset consists of 298 transcribed images, containing a total of 28850 text lines and 29067 "words"/numbers.

Manually chosen pages (meaning that not all pages from the archive series are a part of the dataset) that contains many numbers from the following archive series are part of the dataset:

doc_id	archive_series	period	notes
9177795	Blandet indhold - Asiatisk Kompagni, Afdelingen i København - Negotiejournal ; Asiatisk Kompagni, Afdelingen i Trankebar - Hovedbog	1719-1775	Consists of pages from two archive series: Asiatisk Kompagni, Afdelingen i København – Negotiejournal and Asiatisk Kompagni, Afdelingen i Trankebar – Hovedbog.
9476418	Rentekammeret - Christian 5.s matrikel. Markbog samt eng-, skov- og græsningstaksationer	1681-1691
9182178	Rentekammeret - Efterretninger om ægtepar, enkemænd og enker for København, Amager, Bornholm, Møn og Sjælland	1771-1771	The archive series is also called ”Oeders efterretninger”.
9178140	Rentekammeret - Folketælling 1787, Landdistrikter	1787-1787

• Curated by: Markus Schunck
• Funded by: Augustinus Fonden
• Language(s) (NLP): Danish
• License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Uses

Direct Use

The dataset is meant primarily as ground truth of numbers from the 18th century Denmark for training HTR models. A separate dataset is available containing ground truth of text (DiEm HTR), and another dataset will be made available containing the ground truth pages for our region detection model as these only partly overlap with the ground truth for HTR.

Unpacking the parquet file and putting the images in a root folder and the alto/page xmls in subfolders called 'alto' and 'page' will allow import of the transcriptions into the desktop client of Transkribus, if you want to include the dataset as training data in your Transkribus project. We have created a small tool 'UnpackRAParquet' that can help you unpack the parquet-files in the proper structure, which is included in the tools/ subfolder of the main DiEm dataset. Windows binary: UnpackRAParquet.exe (SHA256: 22ca34cc3f6a1490a96158b5ec0454094d6e776b3b45aa6627f50e44f2ed2c3b)

Out-of-Scope Use

The dataset is not suited for training textline polygon extraction models, as the polygons have been generated by Transkribus and not manually adjusted. The dataset is not suitable for training models for baseline detection either since only chosen numbers has been annotated and the text on the pages has been ignored. Finally we advice using the DiEm Regions dataset if you want to train a model to detect text regions, as the regions within this dataset has been manually drawn only to contain numbers on the pages. The DiEm Regions dataset should be made available here on Hugging Face in the winter 2025-26.

Dataset Structure

Each data instance represents a single scanned, segmented and transcribed image with handwritten numbers corresponding to either 1 or 2 physical pages from the archive series. The dataset contains the following fields:

• image: a jpeg image containing a scan of the original physical page
• doc_id: the Document ID used inside Transkribus for the document in context of the DiEm project
• sequence: an incremental id denoting the order of the page within the parent document
• alto: an xml-encoded string containing layout and content information of the physical page, stored in ALTO XML, version 4
• page: an xml-encoded string containing layout and content information of the physical page, stored in PAGE XML, version 2013-07-15

To uniquely identify a single page within the dataset, one can use the doc_id integer in combination with the sequence integer.

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

The dataset constitutes the ground truth HTR consisting of numbers created through the Transkribus interface as part of the DiEm project, managed by the National Archives of Denmark. The project seeks to correctly read all the danish parish registers before 1813. The archive series included in the ground truth dataset has been selected to represent how numbers were written in 18th century Denmark to make our HTR-model made from the DiEm HTR-dataset better at recognizing numbers.

Source Data

The source data is sampled from various sources. The source data from the Danish Asiatic Company and derived from a trade journal and a ledger. From the Rentekammeret (the Treasury) we use pages from three archive series: First from Christian V of Denmark’s land register, secondly from the registry of married couples, widower and widows and third from the 1787 national census.

Data Collection and Processing

Only readable, integral numbers were manually marked with a baseline. Some of the numbers were then automatically text recognized with Transkribus’ supermodel The Text Titan I ter, while others were manually transcribed. Some numbers are followed by a character like ‘.’, ‘,’ or ‘:’, but most numbers stand alone. Some numbers are single-digit numbers while others consists of multiple digits. All of the numbers are proofread to Ground Truth.

Who are the source data producers?

The DiEm project’s project workers created the annotations. The original books were written by various administrative and commercial actors in the 17th and 18th century. The scans of the books have been made at the department of retrodigitization at the National Archives of Denmark.

Annotations

Annotation process

Numbers were manually identified on the selected pages, and had baselines and annotation added manually.

Who are the annotators?

Annotations have been created by participants in the DiEm projects at the National Archives of Denmark.

Personal and Sensitive Information

The dataset contains no personal, private or sensitive information as all information is over 200 years old.

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

Be advised that the dataset was created specifically to improve predictions of numbers in the DiEm project, which means that the images are only partly annotated: Only numbers and in some cases the following characters are given a baseline and an annotation.

Recommendations

Users should be aware that: - Only manually chosen pages (containing lots of numbers) from the archive series are part of this dataset. - Only selected numbers and characters are annotated on the pages. - Some numbers are single-digit numbers, while others consists of multiple digits.

Citation [optional]

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Glossary

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More Information

Our thanks and gratitude goes to the Augustinus Foundation for funding the DiEm project, as well as to all the volunteers whose contributions big and small are vital to the success of the project.

Dataset Card Contact

Point of Contact: Markus Schunck