Transcribing 19-20th century Curaçaoan death certificates using Transkribus and GPT

About the HDSC
The Historical Database of Suriname and the Caribbean (HDSC) is dedicated to making historical documents such as slave registers and civil status records available online. This makes it possible to reconstruct life histories of individuals, especially around major transitions such as the abolition of slavery in 1863. Thanks to volunteers and sponsors, the slave registers of Suriname have been viewable online since 2018, followed by those from Curaçao in 2020. Since 2023, the birth certificates of Paramaribo have also become searchable online via the website of the National Archive of Suriname. More civil status records from Suriname and the former Dutch Caribbean are currently being transcribed.

Project
In this project, we further developed the HTR+RegEx model from the MSc thesis for death certificates from Curaçao between 1879 and 1949. We first evaluated the HTR+RegEx model on 1,534 records from 1879 to 1881.

The names and occupations were transcribed by two volunteers (since it had already become apparent that the HTR+RegEx performed insufficiently in this regard), followed by a review project where a final decision was made for the spelling of names and professions, and other fields e.g., dates were checked (these were the extracted entities from the HTR+RegEx model).

We concluded that the model too often failed to find a match due to errors in the HTR. These empty fields are undesirable for citizen scientists in a review project. There were actually too many errors to consider it a review project and to ensure quality. Therefore, we experimented with GPT-4 instead of regular expressions to see if it was better capable of extracting entities from the HTR-processed text.

We successfully increased the scores. GPT-4 always provides an answer, compared to static regular expressions which often fail. This slightly increased the number of incorrect entities but also increased the number of correct entities.

In the end, we processed ~24,000 death certificates using the HTR+GPT model. We refer to our report at the top of this page for more information. We now started processing Surinamese death certificates. A similar HTR+GPT model will be built to match the layout and text of these scans.