the wismar tribunal: a survey of the research 99 of the seventeenth century. Its nucleus was Mevius’ library along with those of his father and his grandfather, all of them professors in Greifswald. Soon we will know what impact the library had on justice in Sweden’s provinces in northern Germany. And once again, the man who first analysed the library was Kjell Åke.6 What to do next? I hope for a small museum in Wismar to give people a sense of the importance of the law court that once sat there and its influence on European justice. The impressive six-volume work that is Mevius’ Decisiones was in daily use around the Baltic, but is forgotten today. A museum on the historic site, showing the hard work it did as a court of justice and the many Enlightenment ideas it acted on, would be a worthwhile exercise, albeit perhaps a little old-fashioned. What can we do with twenty-first century means? The Stade and Wismar case files are now catalogued and people can research names and places online, as I mentioned, so the next step is to digitize the entire corpus and put it on the web. Platforms such as Europeana and Archivportal-D already offer hundreds of volumes of the proceedings of the Council and the mayors of Wismar, with the minutiae of daily business. What if we were to make the Tribunal case files available there too? And after that, why not add the legal points at issue, the rationes decidendi? There is a very large collection of some tens of thousands of such arguments starting in the 1760s, held in the Landesarchiv Greifswald, not to mention the collection of thousands of sentences from the Tribunal itself, starting in the 1730s and held in Greifswald’s city archive. The University of Greifswald archivist Dirk Alverman and I are working with Austrian colleagues at the University of Innsbruck, who have developed Transkribus, a program that reads handwritten text automatically. Feed the program with twenty pages written in one hand and its transcription, and it will propose an automatic transcription of the rest. The program now has a success rate of 98 per cent over a hundred pages or more. When feeding it pages in different hands from the same period its hit rate is 90 per cent, but generally improves with every page it tran6 Kjell Å Modéer, ‘David Mevius und die Bibliothek des Wismarer Tribunals’, Wismarer Beiträge 15 (2003), 41–8.
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