Artificial Intelligence and the Study of the Written Legacy of Peter the Great and his Associates

The article presents the results of a collaborative project between historians and paleographers from the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and data analysis specialists from Sberbank. The partnership between the two institutions began in 2020,initiated by the Russian Historical Society. The team was tasked with training an artificial intelligence model to recognize the autographs of Peter the Great. The successful completion of this task and the creation of the “Digital Peter” model enabled them, in 2024, to begin developing a new algorithm for recognizing the handwriting of individuals from the Petrine era. The article details the team’s work on creating data sets for both models, which involved establishing principles for document selection, transcribing the texts, and annotating digital copies of the autographs. Furthermore, it outlines the key features of the electronic resources developed over the years of working with Peter's autographs, namely the "Digital Peter" recognition model and the “Autographs of Peter the Great” website.