The poster presents a development project on a theatre studies source that, despite its central value for literary studies and cultural history, has not yet been digitised. The ‘Deutscher Bühnen=Spielplan’, a stage programme almanac, was published between 1896 and 1944, recording all the programmes of German-language theatres in the form of calendar lists and thus documenting the reality of modern theatre performances.

The focus is on processing the volumes printed in Gothic script up to 1910. Their complex layout can be captured using the advanced layout analysis functions of Transkribus (combination of field and table models) in order to use line and text recognition models for automatic transcription of the table contents in the next step. The long-term goal is to create a web application that will fully reflect the information density of the ‘Bühnen=Spielplan’, which also contains details such as translation versions and guest performances. At the same time the project serves as an example of the application of AI for the development of similar sources that are relevant to cultural history but challenging in terms of layout.