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?
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Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
31–40 of 267 posts
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#32I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can OCR is VERY good
> I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can I do. > OCR is VERY good Uh, my experience is extremely different.
I would challenge you to find a picture of text that you think a human can read and OCR cannot. I’m happy to demonstrate. The text shown in this article is trivial.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#33Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#34The 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.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#35Isn'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 M…
I've seen people do that, and the results are.. just sad. These modern models insert their twitter-era "what grabs attention must be true" view into the very little authentic past we still possess.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#36It says "The following is the dedication of James Lambert a soldier of the Revolutionary wars with the Americas." blah blah blah
I'm not too sure about that reading, I got "The following is the declaration of James Lambert a soldier of the Revolutionary War in South America." rather different
I got “North America”
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#37This 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 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?
No.
Cursive writing is analog and fluid, lacking consistency across authors and often inconsistent by an individual author as well. When done well, it could be classified as its own art form. When done poorly, it can resemble the path walked by a chicken on meth.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can I do. > OCR is VERY good Uh, my experience is extremely different.
I would challenge you to find a picture of text that you think a human can read and OCR cannot. I’m happy to demonstrate. The text shown in this article is trivial.
The archivists themselves say that they run into such texts often enough that this program was needed:
> 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.
They are absolutely aware of the advances in these tools, so if they say they're not completely there yet I believe them. One likely reason is that the models probably have less 1800s-era cursive in their training set than they do modern cursive.
It's likely that with more human-tagged data they could improve on the state of the art for OCR, but it's pretty arrogant to doubt the agency in charge of this sort of thing when they say the tech isn't there yet.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#39Before 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 especi…
OK, fair enough, but can you find one in this article that's hard for an LLM? The gnarliest one I saw, 4o handled instantly, and I went back and looked carefully at the image and the text and I'm sold.
Like if this is a crowdsourcing project, why not do a first pass with an LLM and present users with both the image and the best-effort LLM pass?
Later
I signed up, went to the current missions, and they all seem to post post-1900 and all typeset. They're blurry, but 4o cuts through them like a hot knife through butter.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#40I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can OCR is VERY good
I've been trying every state of the art OCR solution on my students' handwritten essays for fifteen years and have yet to find anything even close to acceptable.