handwriting

In cases where there is a larger collection of manuscripts, the scribe or author of which is unknown or in doubt, analyzing such manuscripts can take a lot of time and effort. The more pages and potential writers are involved, the more complicated it is to get tangible results. LiViTo is a free tool2 that requires a minimum of experience with the command line and allows a simplified search for keywords, revisions, and clustering of historical manuscripts. We present the application of LiViTo on the “lab case” of the biographies of Czech Protestant refugees from the 18th–19th century. Most of these manuscripts include stories of farmers’ and craftsmen’s families who fled to Berlin because of their religious beliefs. The examination of this type of biographies and manuscripts using the methods of Digital Humanities takes place for the first time for Czech. Using extracts from the research project in which LiViTo was developed, individual functions of the tool are explained. In addition, individual findings relating to the manuscripts and the potential further development of the tool are presented.