Work done with an Alumnae of Northwestern grant on equity court deposition hands is generating good results on our @transkribus secretary hand model after 2 training rounds. CER=character error rate. WER = word error rate. Red=AI errors; green=corrections. Northwestern Law

I mean, not the easiest hand. Our Early Modern English secretary hand is getting pretty good. Almost to 400,000 words in the model. Transkribus Helen Good

In working on our Transkribus model, a colleague found this in a STAC case from 1615 (90 years earlier than attested in the OED): "mathewe Brewster & margarett his wife in most vncivill scornefull & contemptuous manner bade him ... kisse his the sayd Brewsters Arse" 👍

Not really how I foresaw preparing for a law school class.

In 1593, William Newport of Hallingbury Morley, Essex, bricklayer, aged 78, being asked about Thremhall Priory, which he remembers bc he lived there "before the dissolucion of the Abbeys with the then Pryor of Thremhall whose name was Symon Spooner"

From Chancery deposition from the 1590s: “the defendant Refused to geve generall warrantie to the plaintiff for the said farme in these termes as this def remembreth (viz) that the plaintiff shuld first bynde him to a post and shoote at hym”

I think we will be ready to make our English secretary hand model public later this year. We are pleased with the progress we have made and are closing in on 500,000 words in the model, including deposition hands. Helen Good MarineLives Transkribus Vanessa Wilkie

Deposition of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, on the inheritance of Henry Seymour, written by Cecil himself in the first person, which is unusual for depositions. TNA C24/255, box 2, case 55 (1597).

That the plaintiff can reede and write dutche and can vnderstand a lyttle englishe and she hath seen the pl looke now & then into an englishe book to keep hym busye a lyttle but whether he can reede englishe or but looked into the booke to learne to reed or not she cannot tell

whether did not you ... drawe your dagger offringe to stabb or wounde him...and vse theis speeches ... Bosgrave by the body of god thou dost abuse mee and haste so abused mee in followinge this cause as fleshe and bloode can not beare yt...

From an interrogatory C 24/235 no. 30 (1593): "wether did not yow ye said Laurance at such time as ye said proces wer served vppon yow vse thes or ye like wordes in effect. yᵗ is to saye. A farte for yow & your proces to"

Congratulations to my amazing colleague Sarah Lawsky on winning the Northwestern University Walder Award for Research Excellence. news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/0…

C 24/248, box 1, #32: "he can say little to the hand wryting of master James dier for sometymes he wrote romane hand & sometyme mingled Court & secretary & varied much in his writinges"--Dyer was CJ of CP.

Egerton, the Transkribus English secretary hand model, now has over 650,000 words and a character error rate of 3%. This document had a CER of 1.34% and a word error rate of 5.95%.

Deposition in Exchequer by Rodrigo Lopez, Queen Elizabeth's physician, who was executed for treason.

You know it's bad when you are called a very "rascall connycaching knave"

“A couple of archivists from major libraries [...] assured me it was not possible to create a secretary hand model. But Transkribus created a model very quickly.” Legal historian @ek27.bsky.social tells us about her model for #English #secretaryhand: bit.ly/3A3kqTU

Thank you Transkribus for writing about the Egerton model for English secretary hand!

From a Chancery deposition, Easter term 1597: “That he was sent oftentymes by Sir Moyle ffinch to my old lady his mother & having speeches with her of Sir Moile ffinches loue towardes her she sayd she loved Sir moile ffinches little fynger more then any other of her sonnes”

Really pleased with the results we are getting on our @transkribus secretary hand model, named Egerton, on this particular 1590s Chancery deposition hand that we have trained pretty extensively.