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Ask HN: OCR for 100 year old (German) handwritten cursive script?

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Re: Ask HN: OCR for 100 year old (German) handwritten cursive script?

#13

Post by re5i5tor »

AJJB_alt wrote: post #9

GPT-4 Vision. I have seen some examples of middly agy looking pages tried.

I've been scripting GPT-4 Vision to extract structured recipe data from handwritten recipe cards, with very good success. Can't speak to the German language aspect.

(Edited to clarify more than just transcribing)

Re: Ask HN: OCR for 100 year old (German) handwritten cursive script?

#14

Post by telotortium »

TillE wrote: post #12
sneak wrote: post #6

For only 200 pages, I’d farm it out to humans.

"Humans" in this case means specialist historians, but yes.

100-year-old handwriting is probably not that obscure - it's not cuneiform or hieroglyphics. There are probably lots of people, especially older people, who could transcribe it. Finding them would be the issue.

Re: Ask HN: OCR for 100 year old (German) handwritten cursive script?

#15

Post by Tomte »

TillE wrote: post #12
sneak wrote: post #6

For only 200 pages, I’d farm it out to humans.

"Humans" in this case means specialist historians, but yes.

There are many many Germans alive who learned Sütterlin and similar scripts in school and used them for decades. It‘s not exactly Linear B.

Even I (below 45) read some small Sütterlin texts in school (mostly German or history books). Not fluent, but you can quite quickly get used to it and decipher things slowly.

Re: Ask HN: OCR for 100 year old (German) handwritten cursive script?

#17

Post by sneed_chucker »

You probably want to put it in front of an actual person and get them to transcribe it for you. I don't think there's any off the shelf OCR that will work particularly well for it.

I have a close family member who is a historian and frequently read and transcribed mid 19th to early 20th century German handwriting for his work.

Many historians and archivists in Germany would have the ability to transcribe this for you if you reached out to them and paid for their time.

Re: Ask HN: OCR for 100 year old (German) handwritten cursive script?

#19

Post by jbverschoor »

telotortium wrote: post #14
TillE wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Humans" in this case means specialist historians, but yes.

100-year-old handwriting is probably not that obscure - it's not cuneiform or hieroglyphics. There are probably lots of people, especially older people, who could transcribe it. Finding them would be the issue.

It’s not obscure, but it’s like a doctor’s handwriting. It takes a lot of effort if possible at all for me
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