Shorthand Secrets: Deciphering Astrid Lindgren's Stenographed Drafts with HTR Methods

Astrid Lindgren, Swedish author of children’s books, is known for having both composed and edited her literary work in the Melin system of shorthand (a Swedish shorthand system based on Gabelsberger). Her original drafts and manuscripts are preserved in 670 stenographed notepads kept at the National Library of Sweden and The Swedish Institute of Children’s Books. For long these notepads have been considered undecipherable and are until recently untouched by research. This paper introduces handwritten text recognition (HTR) and document image analysis (DIA) approaches to address the challenges inherent in Lindgren’s original drafts and manuscripts. It broadly covers aspects such as preprocessing and extraction of words, alignment of transcriptions and the fast transcription of large amounts of words. This is the first work to apply HTR and DIA to Gabelsberger-based shorthand material. In particular, it presents early-stage results which demonstrate that these stenographed manuscripts can indeed be transcribed, both manually by experts and by employing computerised approaches.