DECRYPT: Decryption of historical manuscripts

The aim of the project is to establish a new cross-disciplinary scientific field of Historical Cryptology by bringing the expertise of the different disciplines together for collecting data, exchanging methods for faster progress to decode and contextualize historical encrypted manuscripts.
The project will result in an openly accessible web-service with thousands of encrypted manuscripts, encryption keys and tools for (semi)-automatic decryption. We focus on the development of software tools for automatic analysis allowing users to decrypt various types of encrypted documents from our history on-line. Additionally, we will provide a large collection of historical texts from different time periods and language models for 15 European languages in a standardized format allowing search and studies of language variation and change over time.