---
title: icdar2021-historical-document-dating
canonical_url: "https://www.modelscope.cn/datasets/biglam/icdar2021-historical-document-dating"
md_url: "https://www.modelscope.cn/datasets/biglam/icdar2021-historical-document-dating.md"
repository: biglam/icdar2021-historical-document-dating
last_updated: 2026-08-24
license: cc-by-4.0
storage_size: "26 GB"
downloads: 319
stars: 0
---

# icdar2021-historical-document-dating

> icdar2021-historical-document-dating - biglam 在 ModelScope 开源的数据集。ICDAR 2021 Historical Document Classification — Task 2 (Dating)

biglam/icdar2021-historical-document-dating 是 ModelScope 魔搭社区上的数据集，存储大小 26 GB，采用 cc-by-4.0 许可。

- **Repository**: biglam/icdar2021-historical-document-dating
- **License**: cc-by-4.0
- **Storage size**: 26 GB
- **Downloads**: 319
- **Stars**: 0
- **Last updated**: 2026-08-24

Source: https://www.modelscope.cn/datasets/biglam/icdar2021-historical-document-dating

---

# ICDAR 2021 Historical Document Classification — Task 2 (Dating)

**13,810 manuscript page images** labelled with the period in which they were produced.
Images come from [e-codices](https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/), the virtual manuscript library
of Switzerland.

| Split | Images | Date range | Median span | Dated to a single year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| train | 11,294 | 800–1899 | 45 years | 1,409 |
| test | 2,516 | 800–1921 | 49 years | 264 |

## The label is an interval, not a year

Palaeographers date a manuscript to a **range**, and the width of that range encodes their
confidence. This dataset preserves that:

- `date_start`, `date_end` — the range as published
- `date_span` — `end - start`. **0 means dated to a single year.**
- `date_mid` — midpoint, a convenience point-target

Precision varies enormously: some pages are pinned to one year (`1505–1505`), others sit inside a
**two-century** window (`1250–1449`). Any sensible model or metric has to handle that heterogeneity
— a plain regression on `date_mid` throws away the confidence signal, and a plain accuracy metric
treats a two-century guess as equal to a one-year one. Consider weighting by `date_span`, or
scoring interval overlap rather than point error.

## Gotchas in the source deposit

Two things will silently corrupt a naive build. Both are handled here.

**The two ground-truth files use different delimiters.**

```
dating/training/gt.csv   img/0_1400_1430.jpg,1400,1430          <- COMMA
dating/test/gt.csv       img/667cd1e1....jpg;1200;1299          <- SEMICOLON
```

Parse both the same way and the test split collapses into a single junk column — with a
plausible-looking row count. Verified: with the right delimiters, all 2,516 test images join to a
label, and all 11,294 train images do too.

**The test labels are NOT missing — despite appearances.** Zenodo publishes a separate
`task2-dating-test-meta.csv` alongside the archive that maps test images to their source manuscript
and contains **no dates at all**. It is a provenance file, not the ground truth. The real test
labels live inside `dating.tar.gz` at `dating/test/gt.csv`. Anyone glancing at the Zenodo file list
would reasonably conclude this is a competition set with a withheld test split. It isn't.

Also: training filenames encode the range (`5639_1467_1467.jpg`), but **test filenames are opaque
hashes** — you must use the CSV.

## Load

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

# 28 GB of page images - stream unless you want the whole deposit on disk
ds = load_dataset("biglam/icdar2021-historical-document-dating",
                  split="train", streaming=True)

# keep only tightly-dated pages; date_span == 0 means dated to a single year
tight = ds.filter(lambda r: r["date_span"] <= 25)
```

## Source & credit

Mathias Seuret, Anguelos Nicolau, Dalia Rodríguez-Salas et al. *ICDAR 2021 Historical Document
Classification Dataset for Task 2 — Dating.* Zenodo, 2021-05-28.
<https://zenodo.org/records/4836687> — CC-BY-4.0.

Images courtesy of e-codices, Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland. This repository converts
the 28 GB deposit to Parquet. Please cite the original authors and the ICDAR 2021 competition.

```bibtex
@dataset{seuret_2021_icdar_dating,
  author    = {Seuret, Mathias and Nicolau, Anguelos and Rodr{\'i}guez-Salas, Dalia and
               Weichselbaumer, Nikolaus and Stutzmann, Dominique and Mayr, Martin and
               Maier, Andreas and Christlein, Vincent},
  title     = {{ICDAR 2021 Historical Document Classification Dataset for Task 2 --- Dating}},
  year      = {2021},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.4836687}
}
```