Trinity College Dublin — Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland

The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI), led from Trinity College Dublin, works to digitally reconstruct archives destroyed in the 1922 Four Courts fire. The project found that while HTR tools such as Transkribus and eScriptorium removed the expense of purely manual transcription, they still produced 'dirty' text with critical errors. VRTI researchers therefore use eScriptorium as the base of an improved image-to-transcription workflow, building custom interfaces that let historians draw bounding boxes around poorly transcribed regions and trigger re-transcription, and exploring LLM/CNN methods to raise accuracy. An Irish example of HTR being adapted and improved for large-scale historical reconstruction.