NWO Grant for FORTES Project to Transcribe Historical Tables
NWO has approved the proposal for the FORTES project. The Huygens Institute is one of the partners in this open-source project. It will develop reusable digital methods that enable researchers and heritage institutions to make historical handwritten texts in complex layouts, such as ledgers and accounts, more accessible and usable.
Centuries-old ledgers, trade registers, and accounts contain vast amounts of information about trade, the economy, and daily life. Although many of these archival documents have now been digitized as scans, they are often still barely searchable or analyzable. Tables and other complex layouts pose a major challenge for existing AI and transcription software.
The FORTES research project—Framework for Open Research on Trade and Economic Sources—aims to change that. The project, led by Assistant Professor of Accounting Sabine Go, has received a grant under the TDCC 2025 call from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
Automatically readable historical data
FORTES is developing open-source methods to automatically convert handwritten historical tables into structured and analyzable data. The project is working with, among other sources, the books of the Amsterdam Wisselbank and the records of the Middelburg Commercie Compagnie. These collections are of great importance for the economic and social history of the Netherlands and its trade networks in Europe and beyond.
Thanks to these new methods, researchers will soon be able to analyze historical transactions on a large scale, reconstruct trade networks, and investigate economic developments over long periods. The techniques developed within FORTES are also being tested on a variety of other sources, such as population registers, patient records, cadastral tables, and historical weather data, so that they are broadly applicable and heritage institutions can reuse them to make their collections more accessible to researchers, students, and the general public.
The project will begin in the fall of 2026 and will run for 24 months. In addition to technical development, FORTES places a strong emphasis on collaboration and knowledge sharing. The project organizes training sessions, workshops, and practical guides for researchers and heritage professionals. All software, models, and datasets will be made openly available so that other researchers and institutions can reuse and further develop the methods.
The project team consists of Sabine Go (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam / International Institute of Social History), Gerhard de Kok and Lodewijk Petram (Huygens Institute), Leon van Wissen (University of Amsterdam), and Christiaan van Bochove (Utrecht University). FORTES collaborates with partners including Maastricht University, Radboud University, the University of Regensburg, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Amsterdam City Archives, and the Zeeuws Archief.
