Two PhD candidates at the University of Pennsylvania explored handwritten text recognition (HTR) technology to transcribe premodern Italian and Devanāgarī manuscripts from Penn's collections during a 2025-2026 fellowship. Using the open-source platform eScriptorium and the Kraken ATR system, they created ground truth data through manual transcription to train models, investigating how HTR might streamline manuscript work and enable new research approaches across different scripts.