An Alchemical Prima Materia for the Digital Age: Making the Early Modern Latin Alchemical Prints (EMLAP) Dataset

This article documents the creation of EMLAP (Early Modern Latin Alchemical Prints), a machine-readable corpus of one hundred Latin alchemical printed works produced within the TOME (The Origins of Modern Encyclopaedism, 2023-2025) project. It first situates the corpus within both the digital humanities landscape and the historiography of alchemy, where the availability of reliable machine-readable texts remains limited. It then addresses the challenges of converting early modern Latin printed text into machine-readable format with a high standard of quality. The article argues that producing a high-quality transcribed corpus at scale still requires human scholarly intervention, and that a transcription project must balance the ideal of digital edition standards against the practical constraints of time and resources. The article describes the practical experience of building EMLAP: the selection of the Transkribus platform for AI-powered automatic text recognition, the choice of transcription models, the development of human quality standards to complement automated metrics, and the construction of a computational pipeline to process and enrich the transcriptions. The EMLAP corpus has been made publicly available in open access (Zenodo repository) as well as in the form of a website that offers different search opportunities for researchers.