Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help

It's a really interesting project. But boy do they make it hard to participate.

* Article doesn't provide a direct link to the topic mission

* Signup is pretty easy. Well organized and even gently requires you to have two forms of 2FA.

* Sign up complete. Go back to the primary page and try to find the mission. A little buried but not too deep.

* Notice I'm not signed in. Ok, let's do that. Now I'm back on the main page and navigate back. Find the first document and open it. Really interesting to scan through the doc and to read. People back then generally had really nice handwriting.

* Ok, what next, how do I transcribe? ... ? Oh it says I'm not logged in again. Fine, click the link and...

* I'm logged in and directed back to the main page, again.

Look, this is an interesting project and I'd love to spend my spare cycles to help out. But they really need to clean up this process.

Volunteers shouldn't have to jump through kinda poorly designed interfaces to help out.

Before commenting asking about why they don't just use LLMs, please note that the article specifically calls out that they do, but it's not always a viable solution:

> The agency uses artificial intelligence and a technology known as optical character recognition to extract text from historical documents. But these methods don’t always work, and they aren’t always accurate.

The document at the top is likely an especially easy document to read precisely because it's meant to be the hook to get people to sign up and get started. It isn't going to be representative of the full breadth of documents that the National Archives want people to go through.

Ok I did one letter, from a woman in 1814 writing to James Monroe (then Secretary of State) asking for a passport to go to Scotland to get her late brother's property. What a trip! So enjoyable to get into the flow once you've "synchronized" with the persons handwriting. Furthermore, due to the fact that you're reading and re-writing word for word of whatever you're transcribing, the stories you end up reading have tremendous memory-stick. This is not surprising, considering that you are dedicating an inordinate amount of time per page, but it's a welcome side effect when you try and recollect.

cheers! I was looking for something semi productive to sink a Friday night into

on a more serious note, working through a transcription project for letters and journals that nobody has touched since they've been archived is such a wonderful feeling. Aside from being in front of the physical document itself, your degree of separation from the writer and point is time is vanishingly small!

I always like to observe when they cross something out or make a mistake and think about what could have caused that. Did a friend pass by the door and scare them? Did they get distracted looking out the window? It's all so close and yet so far away :)

Americans... consider reading handwriting a superpower?

This explains a lot

To tptacek and other guys who seem to have unwavering trust in OCRs/LLMs, as well as to opposite party who think that technology is not there yet — you are all partially right, but somehow fail to hear each other while also spending time on baseless arguing instead of factual examples and attempts to find common truth.

Can it be used to greatly simplify efforts by getting through boilerplate? — Yes.

Should the result be reviewed and proof-read by human? — Also yes.

---

Here subtle one: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/34384201?objectPage=40

Here is (one of) transcripts made by `o1-pro`:

  (2)

  …and I don’t know whether it can be reset for a
  date in December or not. Cornell seemed
  anxious that it should not come up too close to Christmas,
  and of course new suspicion [would be aroused?] [about?] him.
  I will take this up with the Judge as soon as I can get rid of the brief.
  Meanwhile I would like to know whether there is anything else
  in which I can be useful to you, since it behooves me
  in ways of uncomfortable relations with the present management.

  Are you going East in December?
  Has any word come from Hagerman?
  Were there any noteworthy developments at the hearings
  on the [Teapot?] trial?

  I have no inclination yet whether Wheeler will be wanted in
  Washington, but the chances are that he will not.

  With regards to all the brethren and [flock?], I am

  very sincerely yours,
  George A. H. Fraser

Somehow GPT-4o performs better on this example and fails only on "New Mexican practise" part.

Seems like something that some of those big AI companies that are desperately starved of training material could chip in on, no? Actually do something for the public good, spend a few cents of that VC money, get some high-quality training data out of it?

I’m interested to give this a go because I want to practice reading cursive. I do a lot of longhand writing including writing all my notes in cursive. It’s exciting to watch my binding fill up with all sorts of different subjects!

I like to write in cursive for a few reasons

1. I find it makes my hand cramp less 2. It offers some shallow privacy in public 3. I don’t want to lose the skill 4. It’s fun!

Today I learned that in the us children are not taught cursive handwriting. This is rather absurd to me. How are they supposed to write?

This is all very cool so I’m not trying to be dismissive. In a lot of ways, giving a hobby out as a way to participate in the national archives is an end in itself.

But…computers can definitely do this way better, right?

This reminded me of something the historian Megan Marshall wrote in the introduction to her book The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005):

“I became expert in deciphering the sisters’ handwriting, and that of their ancestors, parents, and friends. Each era and each correspondent presented different challenges. Some hands were sprawling, some spindly, some cramped; t’s went uncrossed at the ends of words, and f’s and s’s were interchanged; spelling, capitalization, and punctuation could be erratic or idiosyncratic. Often, to save paper and postage, the sisters turned a single sheet ninety degrees and wrote back across a page already covered with handwriting. I learned to be especially attentive to these cross-written lines, in which the sisters invariably confided their deepest feelings in the last hurried moments of closing a letter. Here I would find the urgent personal message that had been put off for the sake of dispensing news or settling business. In one such postscript, I discovered Elizabeth’s account of a conversation with Horace Mann in which the two spoke frankly of their love for each other and finally settled on what it meant.”

A photograph of a letter with cross-writing is here:

https://www.masshist.org/database/1774

Marshall wrote more in an article for Slate:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/05/reading-the-peab...

The handwriting in some of these snippets, while sometimes difficult to read for one reason or another, is nonetheless beautiful: did everyone who wrote have such great handwriting back then?

I'm looking at the piece in the Instagram post linked by the page, which begins, "honor of holding in their service". The lines are so straight, the letters are so uniform!

After using a keyboard for circa 50 years, I can't read my own handwriting. I can't even give a reproduceable signature.

Isn't this like a bread-and-butter AI task?

“The following is the declaration of James Lambert, a soldier of the Revolutionary War in North America.” “The said James Lambert, on this day personally appeared in the Probate Court of the County of Dearborn in the State of Indiana, at the November Term of said Court [1841], it being a court of record created by the laws of Indiana, and made oath that on the 25th day of March 1842 he will be eighty‐five years old; that he was born in the State of Maryland; that he is now a resident of [said] county and has been for the [27] years last past; that he has lived in Virginia, Maryland, [and Pennsylvania]; that…”

These kinds of problems, matching up cursive to actual text, would seem to play to the absolute best strengths of an LLM, given how much basic language structure the models encode.

Funnily enough, there have been a few times over the past couple of years I've been asked by younger co-workers to read something for them that was written in cursive. I hadn't really realized it had become such a (comparatively) rare skill. This fact is making me feel older than my actual 50th birthday did!

The Australian War Memorial has a volunteer program for transcribing old letters and diaries and such: https://transcribe.awm.gov.au/

I gave it a go but it was too hard for me! I write in cursive but I found most of it illegible.

> particularly for Americans who never learned cursive in school.

American schools don’t teach it anymore?!

I have a family heirloom civil war journal and much of it is unfortunately near undecipherable cursive writing.

It would be great if this would eventually develop into some kind of set of open models that would work on content like this.

My brother in history, I can't even read mine

It might be nice for people to be able to actually read the documents in the National Archives rather than relying on a transcription or a mobile app.

I wonder if they've considered making a simple tutorial on how to read cursive? It's not that hard if you can already read printed English. And of course you can practice on documents in the National Archives.

It's exciting and fun to learn to read an unfamiliar script, like the runes on the cover of The Hobbit ... or the engraving-style cursive of the US Constitution.

I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can

OCR is VERY good

Why do they need volonteers to manually do it? Open AI models like Microsoft's TrOCR are very effective for handwritten English

It says "The following is the dedication of James Lambert a soldier of the Revolutionary wars with the Americas."

blah blah blah