The Flow Project

This is the documentation of the Flow Project — a collaborative research initiative (2023–2026) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) and the German Research Foundation (DFG).

What is Flow?

Flow develops standardized, user-friendly digital workflows for historians and humanities researchers working with premodern historical sources. The goal is to make machine-learning capabilities accessible without requiring data science expertise — enabling corpus-level analysis of extended document collections.

What can you do with it?

• Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) — transcribe historical manuscripts automatically
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) — extract structured information from historical texts
• Semi-automated analysis — process large corpora across multiple historical languages and scripts

How is it structured?

The Flow environment is modular. It consists of independent packages (Python libraries) and services (FastAPI microservices) that cover the full HTR/ATR pipeline: preprocessing, segmentation, training, and inference.

Partners

Developed jointly by the University of Bern (Digital Humanities), the University of Bielefeld (Digital History), and the Research Centre for Hanse and Baltic History, Lübeck.