Eug Xu is a third year undergraduate in the history department working towards a minor in the Digital Humanities. For their history honors thesis, Eug is researching patterns in the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) textile procurement in India and export to Southeast Asia and Europe. Doing this research requires transcribing and translating early 17th century Dutch secretary hand, which has thus far been an access barrier to robust VOC research. Thus, for the Mellon Summer Undergraduate Fellowship, Eug will be working on learning to use and training deep learning handwritten text recognition (HTR) models as potentially powerful tools to aid and make accessible archival research. Eug Xu also works as a Data Science & Society Research Assistant at Research Data and Digital Scholarship. Thus far, much of their work has revolved around AI ethics.