From Archival Sources to Structured Historical Information: Annotating and Exploring the "Accordi dei Garzoni"

If automatic document processing techniques have achieved a certain maturity for present time documents, the transformation of hand-written documents into well-represented, structured and connected data which can satisfactorily be used for historical study purposes is not straightforward and still presents major challenges. Transitioning from documents to structured data was one of the key challenges faced by the Garzoni project and this chapter details the techniques and the steps taken to represent, extract, enhance and exploit the information contained in the archival material.