Sigurdur/19th-century-icelandic-letters

19th Century Icelandic Letters OCR Benchmark

Handwritten letter dataset from Bréfasafn Árnastofnunar.

Dataset

• Source: Bréfasafn 19. aldar — Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
• Size: ~1,640 handwritten letters from ~350 writers
• Images: Full-resolution color scans (3264×2176 px JPG), 0–12 images per letter
• Text: Diplomatic transcriptions with TEI-like markup, plus cleaned plain text
• License: CC BY 4.0

Features

Column	Type	Description
id	int32	Letter ID on source site
filename	string	Archive filename
date	string	Letter date
place_*	string	Writing location
note	string	Editorial note
collection	string	Source archive
shelfmark	string	Shelfmark in archive
recipient_name	string	Recipient name
recipient_title	string	Recipient title/occupation
image_status	string	Note about image condition
writer_*	string	Writer metadata
text_plain	string	Clean plain text transcription
text_html	string	Raw HTML transcription with markup
images	List[Image]	Full-res PIL images
image_urls	List[str]	Source URLs for the images

Splits

80/10/10 train/validation/test, stratified by writer to prevent data leakage.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("Sigurdur/19th-century-icelandic-letters", split="train")
print(ds[0]["text_plain"])
ds[0]["images"][0]

Citation

@software{19th_century_icelandic_letters,
  author    = {Sigurður Haukur},
  title     = {19th Century Icelandic Letters OCR Benchmark},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/Sigurdur/19th-century-icelandic-letters}
}

Also cite: Bréfasafn 19. aldar, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum. https://brefasafn.arnastofnun.is/