DECRYPT – Decryption of historical manuscripts

Overview

Project duration: 2019 - 2024 Date coverage: 1301 - 1945 Website Contact

Historical Documents (e.g. Notarial sources; Census records; Ecclesiastical documents; Correspondence) Archive OA Tools for data mining/extraction OCR / HTR Machine Learning Platform for data aggregation or retrieval

Thousands of enciphered historical manuscripts are buried in libraries and archives. Examples of such material are diplomatic correspondence and intelligence reports, private letters and diaries as well as manuscripts related to secret societies, or other (religious) groups in the margins of society. The bulk of these historical manuscripts will remain undeciphered unless we can automate the processes involved in decoding them. Our aim is to develop resources and computer-aided tools for decoding of historical source material by using AI and cross-disciplinary research involving computational linguistics, cryptology, history, linguistics and philology.

Within the DECRYPT project, we release resources and tools with open access to facilitate research in historical cryptology, allowing the collection, analysis and decryption of historical ciphertexts. Resources are collections of encrypted sources, a large collection of historical texts for 15 European languages and language models. The tools facilitate the processing of the encrypted sources from transcription to decryption incl. cryptanalysis.

Project partners

With financial support by