The Genesis of a News System

The Travel Routes of the Handwritten Newsletter Network

Wouter Kreuze

In the sixteenth century, news was often disseminated through the genre of the handwritten newsletter. The phenomenon is generally understood to have originated in Italy, but progressively started to involve a wider variety of regions. This means that whereas initially, the core area of the news network had mainly consisted of catholic lands, now also areas under different confessions were incorporated.

Different than for printed news, manuscript newsletters have hitherto not been collected into large digital datasets. This hampers our understanding of the field and complicates studies from a macro perspective. This project aims to change that. It endeavors to utilize new developments in the realm of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in a method capable of digitizing significant amounts of manuscript news.

This would ultimately aid a better understanding of the dissemination of news between different regions and allow a reconstruction of the travel routes along which news traveled.