Carniolan Provincial Assembly : corpus improvements and enhancements

Pretnar Žagar, Ajda (author), Pahor de Maiti, Kristina (author)

Historical parliamentary corpora offer crucial evidence for studying political discourse over time, yet their usability is often limited by poor OCR quality and incomplete metadata. This paper presents the enhancement of the Kranjska 1.0 corpus, a collection of Carniolan Provincial Assembly proceedings (1861–1913) in Slovenian and German, through a two-phase process aimed at improving textual accuracy and enriching speaker metadata. First, we conducted a manual correction campaign on a representative sample of transcripts, involving trained historians proficient in Gothic script and 19th-century politics. The corrections addressed both structural and textual errors in TEI-encoded XML files, providing a gold-standard dataset for future model training. Error analysis revealed recurring OCR issues, including segmentation problems, misattributed speakers, and systematic character-level noise. Second, we harmonised and expanded speaker metadata using multiple historical sources to unify name variants, resolve ambiguities, and document parliamentary terms, factions, and attendance. The resulting metadata enhance corpus usability and interpretability. This work lays the foundation for the next project phase, which explores the automatic correction of transcripts and metadata using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). By combining historical expertise with computational methods, we contribute to more accurate processing of historical texts and promote transparency and reusability in digital humanities research.

• Language: English
• Keywords: historical parliamentary proceedings, OCR correction, error analysis, metadata enrichment
• Work type: Other
• Typology: 1.08 - Published Scientific Conference Contribution
• Organization: FRI - Faculty of Computer and Information Science ; FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2026
• Number of pages: Str. 1-10
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-180816
• UDC: 004.89:328(497.12)”1861/1913”
• ISSN on article: 2704-1441
• DOI: 10.5617/dhnbpub.13202
• COBISS.SI-ID: 271706883
• Publication date in RUL: 17.03.2026

Record is a part of a proceedings

• Title: Lost in abundance
• COBISS.SI-ID: 271613699

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Digital humanities in the Nordic and Baltic countries publications : DHNB
• Publisher: University of Oslo library
• ISSN: 2704-1441
• COBISS.SI-ID: 228389891

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: zgodovinski parlamentarni zapisniki, popravki napak OCR, analiza napak, obogatitev metapodatkov