Research project DESCRYPT – Echoes of History: Analysis and Decipherment of Historical Writings
This project explores innovative methods for analyzing historical texts written in rare, non-standard, or undeciphered writing systems.
By leveraging advanced techniques from artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, we are developing tools to automatically analyze, transcribe, and interpret historical sources.
Project description
Exploring historical sources is vital for understanding our collective past. Recent initiatives have focused on analyzing sources of the same origin in various well-known languages and their historical varieties. This project proposes new approaches to analyzing and deciphering sources with non-standard, rare or unknown writing systems through automated analysis.
Faced with the challenge of interpreting these invaluable yet enigmatic texts, our research combines advanced computational linguistics and artificial intelligence techniques. The primary aim is to develop novel methods and tools that can identify, transcribe, and interpret texts from these sources, offering new insights into forgotten languages and cultures.
Key objectives include creating a digital corpus of writings, developing recognition models for alphabets, layout, and scripts, and constructing an interpretative framework for linguistic analysis including decipherment. This interdisciplinary effort unites cross-disciplinary expertise from computational linguistics, computer science, image processing, cryptology, linguistics, philology, and history, paving the way for a new understanding of unknown writings.
The expected outcome is a robust, scalable tool to assist historians, linguists, and researchers in unlocking the secrets in these historical documents. We anticipate significant advancements in philological studies, contributing to the preservation and interpretation of cultural heritage across the globe.
We actively promote open science, where everyone has free and open access to texts, research results, tools and data.
For more information, please visit the project website:
descrypt.org
Project members
Project managers
Beata Megyesi
Professor
Members
Micaella Bruton
PhD Student
Crina Madalina Tudor
PhD Student
Raphaela Marion Heil
Forskare
More about this project
The project is financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M24-0028 (2025–2032).