Contracted Contradictions: Discerning Inconsistencies Through Assisted Reading in Repetitive Sets

Reading indentures, diplomatic dispatches, and 19th-century Pacific land contracts closely enough to spot contradictions requires deep familiarity with formulaic language — and that's exactly where Transkribus becomes a research tool rather than just a transcription tool. By enabling systematic assisted reading across a corpus of repetitive documents, this project moves beyond content to detect affective registers, patterns of legal enforcement, and questions of historical legitimacy and temporality that only become visible at scale.