Capturing variation in HTR models for Cyrillic early modern handwriting

Church Slavonic models exist on Transkribus — but what about early modern Cyrillic secular handwriting? This talk compares two model-building projects across very different scripts: 15th-century Church Slavonic semi-uncial and 17th-century East Slavic skoropis'. The central challenge in both is the same: how to produce consistent ground truth while faithfully preserving the orthographic, regional, and scribal variation that makes the material historically valuable.