RA-Data-Science/modern-danish-handwriting

Dataset Card for Modern Danish Handwriting

<!-- Provide a quick summary of the dataset. -->

The Modern Danish Handwriting dataset is a Danish-language dataset containing more than 200 pages of transcribed and proofread handwritten text.

Dataset Details

Dataset Description

<!-- Provide a longer summary of what this dataset is. -->

The Modern Danish Handwriting dataset currently consists of handwritten samples of text from the ePAROLE dataset. The samples were created by volunteers at the Danish National Archives and guests at the festival Historiske Dage in 2025.

The ePAROLE dataset is a 2015-version of the PAROLE, which consists primarily of publically available newspaper and magazine articles from the early 1990s.

The Modern Danish Handwriting dataset consists of 223 transcribed images, containing a total of 977 lines, 5632 words, and 33026 characters (including spaces).

• —Curated by: Joen Rommedahl
• —Language(s): Danish
• —License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Uses

<!-- Address questions around how the dataset is intended to be used. -->

Direct Use

<!-- This section describes suitable use cases for the dataset. -->

The dataset has been created as training data for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) of modern danish handwriting, but can also be used as training data for baseline detection and polygon extraction models, as these have been carefully created and quality checked as well.

Out-of-Scope Use

<!-- This section addresses misuse, malicious use, and uses that the dataset will not work well for. -->

The dataset is not particularly suited as training data for text region detection models, as all text on all samples are contained within a single text region, and thus not representative of how documents would look 'in the wild'.

The line segmentations of the Modern Danish Handwriting dataset is not subdivided into individual words, but operate on textlines as the lowest granularity, and thus cannot be used for training word detection and isolation.

Dataset Structure

<!-- This section provides a description of the dataset fields, and additional information about the dataset structure such as criteria used to create the splits, relationships between data points, etc. -->

Each data instance represents a single scanned, segmented and transcribed physical page with handwritten text. The dataset contains the following fields:

• —image: a jpeg image containing a scan of the original physical page
• —doc_id: internal id of parent document (collection of single pages) to which the page belongs
• —sequence: the specific pagenumber of the page within the parent document
• —page: an xml-encoded string containing layout and content information of the physical page, stored in PAGE XML, version 2013-07-15

To uniquely identify a single page within the dataset, one can use the doc_id integer in combination with the sequence integer.

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

<!-- Motivation for the creation of this dataset. -->

The dataset was created as part of an initiative to let the guests of the Historiske Dage festival explore the proces of handwritten text recognition and training data creation. It also seeks to draw attention to the fact, that no large-scale dataset of modern, danish handwriting exists as a HTR-resource.

Source Data

<!-- This section describes the source data (e.g. news text and headlines, social media posts, translated sentences, ...). -->

The source data consists of written samples of the ePAROLE dataset. The original text is primarily news articles from the 1990s and the handwritten samples were created in 2025.

Data Collection and Processing

<!-- This section describes the data collection and processing process such as data selection criteria, filtering and normalization methods, tools and libraries used, etc. -->

The original physical samples were set up by the Data Science department at the Danish National Archives. The samples were selected randomly from the ePAROLE dataset, curated by The Society for Danish Language and Literature, Ole Norling-Christensen, Britt-Katrin Keson, Jørg Asmussen and more. See the documentation for ePAROLE for further information on how it was created.

Who are the source data producers?

<!-- This section describes the people or systems who originally created the data. It should also include self-reported demographic or identity information for the source data creators if this information is available. -->

The digitized and transcribed sentences were originally written by the journalists of various newspaper outlets and magazines in Denmark, and are publically available.

Text samples of varying length were printed out and handed out to volunteers at the Danish National Archives and guests at the festival Historiske Dage in 2025 with the instruction of writing the text by hand underneath the printed sample while keeping line breaks and formating exactly as the printed text.

After re-collecting the samples, the papers were scanned and the original ePAROLE sample id used to infer what text the volunteer had written. It has not been verified that the volunteers actually wrote the text and preserved line breaks as instructed.

Layout and line segmentation was performed on each page with the Loghi/Laypa toolkit, developed by Rutger van Koert and Stefan Klut at KNAW Humanities Cluster, and afterwards manually corrected by the Data Science departments at the Danish National Archives using the Transkribus interface.

Personal and Sensitive Information

<!-- State whether the dataset contains data that might be considered personal, sensitive, or private (e.g., data that reveals addresses, uniquely identifiable names or aliases, racial or ethnic origins, sexual orientations, religious beliefs, political opinions, financial or health data, etc.). If efforts were made to anonymize the data, describe the anonymization process. -->

The ePAROLE dataset is publically available through The Society for Danish Language and Literature. The Data Science department at the Danish National Archives does not take responsibility for any data therein that might be considered personal, sensitive or private. No efforts have been made to anonymize the data.

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

<!-- This section is meant to convey both technical and sociotechnical limitations. -->

Due to its limited size we do not expect any model trained only on this dataset to achieve great HTR-results. As the text corpus is primarily based on magazine resources, the language represented by the dataset is defined thereby. Thus, there is probably little language from specialized fields nor informal conversation.

More Information

Thank you to the guests at Historiske Dage who contributed to the dataset! Also thank you to all the people involved with creating and maintaining the ePAROLE dataset at The Society for Danish Language and Literature, as one of the few publically available license-free resources of danish language!

Dataset Card Contact

Point of Contact: Joen Rommedahl