SCOOP (Source Codes of the Past) is an international network dedicated to the automatic transcription and analysis of handwritten historical sources. It brings together people from very different corners of the scholarly world: historians, philologists, and palaeographers, archivists and librarians; computer scientists, machine learning researchers, and software engineers. What unites them is a shared challenge: how to use automatic/handwritten text recognition (ATR/HTR) to unlock the vast written heritage of the past, and how to do it well.

After a first smaller meeting at Princeton in June of 2025 (for more information see https://fsp-text-edition-blog.univie.ac.at/?p=128), the second Exchange meeting of SCOOP will take place in Vienna on 7–9 September 2026, hosted by the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Faculty for Cultural Historical Studies at the University of Vienna.

Over three days, it will bring together around a hundred members of the network for keynotes, parallel working group sessions, round tables, demonstrations, and open discussion formats, along with an internal working day devoted to the future of SCOOP. Building on these first two meetings, the network is pursuing a durable institutional footing for this collaboration, including a joint European funding application, so that the exchange begun in Princeton can continue to grow.

Learn more about the SCOOP Exchange network: www.scoop-network.org

Register to the event: https://indico.global/e/scoop