Astrid Lindgren holds a unique position within world literature, yet her enigmatic creative process has for many years been hidden in her original drafts and manuscripts, written in Melin shorthand/stenography. These manuscripts have been considered “impossible” to access and have to date never been subject to research. The purpose of “The Astrid Lindgren Code” is twofold: 1) To access Lindgren’s original stenographed drafts through adaptation of algorithms for handwritten text recognition (HTR), and to refine and develop this digital method further through crowdsourcing. 2) To study the implications of deletions, alterations, and revisions in the stenographic drafts of Lindgren’s work, with particular emphasis on Bröderna Lejonhjärta/The Brothers Lionheart (1973), from the perspectives of genetic criticism, sociological editing, and media history. This part of the study is structured around the three simultaneous roles of author, secretary, and editor that Lindgren took in her own creative process. This three-year project utilises the joint competences of literary scholars, computer scientists, and professional stenographers to unlock the potential in the original drafts to produce new knowledge of world author Lindgren, enable a starting point for full digitalisation and transliteration of Lindgren’s original manuscripts in the future, and provide a general vehicle for methodological development for analysis of handwritten documents.