The core of the our programme exists of two half-day workshops on software packages that may help the researcher automate some aspects of the transcription process. The first will deal with ABBYY, still one of the best software packages around for OCRing digitised print materials. Focusing on the software’s possible advantages and pitfalls, this workshop will show the participants how to prepare their documents in order to achieve the best OCR (optical character recognition) results. The second workshop will introduce Transkribus, a software package that has recently made great advancements in optically recognising characters in handwritten materials.