Christlein and Weichselbaumer's HAVI-funded project builds AI-assisted handwriting recognition for Gabelsberger shorthand, targeting manuscripts by Gödel, Schrödinger, Carl Schmitt, Kästner, and Cardinal Faulhaber

Vincent Christlein (FAU Pattern Recognition Lab) and Nikolaus Weichselbaumer (University of Mainz) are building AI-assisted handwriting recognition for Gabelsberger shorthand — per FAU, "the rare Gabelsberger form of shorthand" in which many manuscripts were written "[p]articularly in the 19th and early 20th century" — under a roughly €770,000, three-year grant from Schmidt Sciences' HAVI (2025 award round). The project exists because shorthand literacy has nearly died out: per FAU's own release, "nowadays only very few people are able to read this writing, meaning that large quantities of archived material are virtually unaccessible."

The named target manuscripts are from mathematician Kurt Gödel, physicist Erwin Schrödinger, legal scholar and politician Carl Schmitt, author Erich Kästner, and Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich — five cases where a historically significant figure's private writing survives only in a notation almost no living scholar can read. Of the five, Gödel's is the deepest case: his private philosophical notebooks were written entirely in this shorthand (see claim-godels-max-phil-notebooks-written-in-gabelsberger-shorthand). Schrödinger's, Schmitt's, Kästner's, and Faulhaber's shorthand papers are named by FAU as project targets but were not independently researched this session.