Synopsis
Thanks to digitization initiatives like VD17 (Union Catalogue of Books Printed in German-Speaking Countries in the 17th Century) many alchemical texts have become available as digital facsimiles. Editing those texts is an important desideratum in the historiography of alchemy and chemistry. The Transkribus software offers promising features for the automated transcription of historical text based on image data. Researchers can freely access a number of pre-trained models, for instance the NOSCEMUS GM 6, a high-performing model for Latin print of the 15th to 19th centuries. In the Innsbruck NOSCEMUS project, about 80 alchemical texts have been machine-transcribed using the aforementioned model. They are available as open access publications and can be reused freely by the research community.

