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Using AI, historians track how astronomy ideas spread in the 16th century

Novel analysis of 76,000 textbook pages shows how widespread astronomy education in Europe was

This image of a series of numbers taken from scanned textbooks used around the 16th century shows how different the numbers all looked, making it challenging to train an AI to find patterns.

This is a random selection of digits extracted from scanned textbooks and used to train an AI as part of a project to see how widespread astronomy education was in the 16th century. The task was challenging, because different printing presses produced different-looking numerals.