Voices of the People: 18th-Century Petitions to the Danish King

300,000 pages of petitions from Danish subjects to their absolute king — a direct, intimate window into 18th-century society that has been locked away by sheer volume and structural complexity. The real challenge isn't the handwriting: it's a layout where petitions and royal responses interweave across overlapping columns, with text continuing wherever the scribe found space. This poster shares the workflow developed to tame that complexity, and the lessons learned about the indispensable role of domain knowledge — from tagging decisions to transcription principles to publication on Transkribus Sites.