Sigurdur/19th-century-icelandic-letters
19th Century Icelandic Letters OCR Benchmark Handwritten letter dataset from Bréfasafn Árnastofnunar. Dataset Source: Bréfasafn 19. aldar — Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies Size: ~1,640 handwritten letters from ~350 writers Images: Full-resolution color scans (3264×2176 px JPG), 0–12 images per letter Text: Diplomatic transcriptions with TEI-like markup, plus cleaned plain text License: CC BY 4.0 Features Column Type… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Sigurdur/19th-century-icelandic-letters.
19th Century Icelandic Letters OCR Benchmark
Handwritten letter dataset from Bréfasafn Árnastofnunar.
Dataset
- Source: Bréfasafn 19. aldar — Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
- Size: ~1,640 handwritten letters from ~350 writers
- Images: Full-resolution color scans (3264×2176 px JPG), 0–12 images per letter
- Text: Diplomatic transcriptions with TEI-like markup, plus cleaned plain text
- License: CC BY 4.0
Features
Splits
80/10/10 train/validation/test, stratified by writer to prevent data leakage.
Usage
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("Sigurdur/19th-century-icelandic-letters", split="train")
print(ds[0]["text_plain"])
ds[0]["images"][0]Citation
@software{19th_century_icelandic_letters,
author = {Sigurður Haukur},
title = {19th Century Icelandic Letters OCR Benchmark},
year = {2026},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/Sigurdur/19th-century-icelandic-letters}
}Also cite: Bréfasafn 19. aldar, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum. https://brefasafn.arnastofnun.is/