The original NZZ Black Letter Ground Truth was published in 2019 by Phillip Ströbel and Simon Clematide under CC BY-NC 4.0. The data set contains 167 randomly chosen frontpages of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) that were published between 1780 and 1947. The ground truth was produced using Transkribus and it's internal ABBYY FineReader Server 11 with additional manual corrections.
For more information about the original data set, the ground truth production, transcription guidelines and known issues, see the corresponding wiki page.
A revision of the data set was carried out by Mannheim University Library
from March 2023 to June 2023 using Transkribus.
All transcriptions are provided as PAGE XML in the data folder.
The revision includes:
- Layout correction of text regions, text lines and baselines.
- Region labeling ("header", "headings", "paragraphs").
- Correction and enhancement of transcriptions according to OCR-D Ground Truth Guidelines Level 2.
The transcription rules are based on the OCR-D Ground Truth Guidelines Level 2 with some exceptions (see below):
-
Special characters:
- Long s (ſ)
- R rotunda (ꝛ)
- Combining latin small letter e ( ͤ)
- Asterisk (*)
-
Additional characters transcribed true to original (contrary to OCR-D Level 2):
- Double oblique hyphen (⸗)
- Em dash (—) instead of En dash (–)
This revision is part of the OCR-D project and predominantly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).