– Join us when Prof. Lincke presents the first ever models for Handwritten Text Recognition for Coptic
in the Göttingen "Digital Coptic Textual Studies" lecture series –

Over the past decade, the Göttingen Academy project Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament has produced the most comprehensive collection of expert-transcribed Coptic manuscripts. These data now make it possible to train reliable Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models that can support future transcription and edition work across the field.
This talk presents an HTR workflow tailored to the characteristics of Coptic documentary and literary hands, developed within the eScriptorium environment using Kraken. It discusses how expert transcriptions can be transformed into training data, how layout information can be standardized via SegmOnto, and what accuracy levels can realistically be achieved with the available material. Beyond technical results, the talk reflects on how a decade of philological effort can now feed into a broader digital ecosystem for Coptic studies, where open data and shared models accelerate manuscript accessibility and enable new forms of research in digital palaeography and layout-based manuscript studies.