SCOOP (Source Codes of the Past) is an international network dedicated to the automatic transcription and analysis of handwritten historical sources. It brings together people from very different corners of the scholarly world: historians, philologists, and palaeographers; archivists and librarians; computer scientists, machine learning researchers, and software engineers. What unites them is a shared challenge: how to use automatic/handwritten text recognition (ATR/HTR) to unlock the vast written heritage of the past, and how to do it well.

Recent years have brought remarkable progress in text recognition technologies, but much work remains in adapting them to the diversity of historical materials, ranging from different scripts and writing systems, varied textual traditions and manuscript structures, to low-resource languages for which training data and tools are scarce. At the same time, ATR is increasingly interwoven with other methodologies, from dataset curation and text reuse analysis to the automation of editorial workflows. These developments are transforming how researchers engage with manuscript sources, and they raise questions that no single discipline can answer alone.

SCOOP exists to bring these conversations together. Technological development, methodological reflection, and the practical needs of editors, cataloguers, and collecting institutions too often happen in separate communities; the network's aim is to let technological and humanistic expertise inform one another directly, across the boundaries of disciplines, languages, and scripts.

SCOOP is open to anyone working on the automatic transcription and analysis of historical sources, across disciplines, scripts, and languages. If you'd like to join the network, write to scoop@oeaw.ac.at, and put Anna Michalcová (a.michalcova@ujc.cas.cz) and Jan Odstrčilík (jan.odstrcilik@oeaw.ac.at) into CC. You will be included into the future communication and given access to the Discord server.

Discord is where much of SCOOP's exchange happens between meetings. It's a free chat platform where conversations are organised into channels: each working group has its own space to discuss its topics, share materials or simply to get to know each other. It's also the easiest place to ask a quick question, share a new tool, dataset, or paper, announce a call or event, or find a collaborator who has already struggled with the same script, language, or pipeline you're facing now.

If you're new to the network, the server is the best way to get a feel for what's going on in SCOOP and to introduce yourself and your project before meeting everyone in person.