Turn primary sources into accessible knowledge

Find your story in the archive​

You’ve photographed the letters, diaries, and ledgers. Now comes the slow part: deciphering faded handwriting in languages you don’t know and tracking down a passage you half-remember reading four hundred pages ago. Decarta is a web-based application that transcribes and translates historic documents, turning scanned pages into a readable, searchable collection, with every line of transcription linked to its place on the original page.

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Read what you couldn’t read before

Upload page images or PDFs, and Decarta transcribes them: handwriting, typescript, and print, in languages from English and German to Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic. Switch instantly between the original language and a translation into English—or the language of your choice. A novelist’s Yiddish letters, a German consular file, and an astronomer’s diary can all become text you can read, search, and quote.

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The primary source is right there

Words don’t always tell the whole story. Decarta links every line it transcribes to its place on the original page image. The sloping handwriting, the hotel stationery, the phrase that was crossed out, the comment shouting from the margin in angry red ink—these details deepen the meaning of the words. As you read the transcription or translation, the original page is always in view.

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See connections that are easy to miss

Decarta tags the people, places, and events on every page and organizes them into an index and timeline for your whole project. Its semantic search tools help you follow people, places, events, and ideas across your sources. Pull up every letter that mentions your subject’s brother, every event that takes place in Odessa, every reference to the 1911 fire.

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Tools to keep track of it all

Use Decarta’s built-in Zotero note-taker to save quotes and comments. Flexible tagging tools let you mark, group, and link passages in ways that make sense to you. Decarta helps by giving documents descriptive titles, summaries, and metadata, so you can tell at a glance what needs a close read.

 

When your story is buried in mountains of documents, Decarta helps you find what you need to read—and helps you read what you find.

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