Project Name: Digital Accessibility of Catherine de’ Medici’s Correspondence

Grantee: Beatrice Mundo

Discipline: French

Funding Cycle: 2024-2025

Project Status:

White Paper:

About the Project:

Catherine de’ Medici’s correspondence, available in 10 open-source volumes , is currently difficult to access due to the fragmentation of OCR on Gallica. The texts are split according to the structure of the volumes and page visualization, making textual analysis challenging. While volumes 1 and 3 lack OCR entirely, the other volumes have OCR, but the text cannot be extracted all at once, limiting large-scale analysis. To solve this issue, I developed a Python script based on Tesseract OCR that converts images into editable text more coherently. This multi-year project aims to adapt this script to create a digital library in HTML TEI, making the epistolary corpus searchable through tools like TXM, TextObserver, and Python. This open-source approach enhances the usability and analysis of the correspondence for historical and literary research.