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

smithsonianmag.com

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

#91

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 t…

> 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.

This was something I enjoyed when I decided to learn a language by translating short stories. (Edit: Of course, you have to choose an author whose diction you respect. Your unfamiliarity with the target language encourages you to mull over the author's use of diction and the nuances the author is trying to convey, and then find appropriate diction in English. This means you spend a long time immersed in the imagery.)

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 The agency uses artificial intelligence and a technology known as optical character recognition to extract text from historical documents.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…

Can someone please post a sample of one of these images that can only be read by a human for us naive OCR believers to see?

To be fair there was a similar discussion a few days ago in which an SME remained unconvinced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42566391

I don't necessarily agree with her conclusion because she wasn't participating directly in the thread and wasn't completely responsive to some of the points raised, but still, it appears that there are a few instances of difficult-to-read handwriting where OCR is still coming in second to skilled human interpretation.

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, all you have to do is feed the image to ChatGPT, and it will read it basically as well as you can. Denying/downvoting reality is always an option, of course.

Not being rude was also an option, one you chose not to take for some reason. Seriously, all it would've taken was for you to say something like "there have been a lot of advancements so it's probably different than you remember". This conversation would've gone much smoother for you if you had. And BugsJustFindMe can't downvote you, because it was a reply to him. So don't bite his head off over it. You got downvoted…

Not being rude was also an option

Refraining from reflexively pooh-poohing AI with uninformed and/or out-of-date opinions is also an option, but not one often exercised on HN.

It gets old not being able to carry on a discussion without squinting at grayed-out text, simply because someone pointed out that humans aren't robots and should no longer have to emulate them.

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

#94

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 t…

> 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. This was something I enjoyed when I decided to learn a language by translating short sto…

What a brilliant idea. I've had learning to read French on my list for a while now, I'm going to try transcription as another way at it.

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

#95
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i dont think the problem is the lack of resources to learn how to read and write cursive

Except that it does say that in the article, that’s it's a lack of education in reading cursive.

I find the article's conflation of two topics involving cursive writing ignorant or disingenuous to the point that I almost wanted to respond with my own comment on that itself. If you study cursive writing in class, you are likely to learn simple and standard letterforms like Palmer script.

But the task requested by the National Archives is more akin to paleography where you can expect each author or work to have their own (region-based/family-based) handwriting that requires decipherment, even for experts. You may have encountered a coworker or schoolmate's indecipherable chicken scratch print writing; that is what you should expect, only cursive.

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two claims. The main one is that all of these documents are easy to individually transcribe by machine. The other is that a whole lot can be OCR'd, which is pretty simple to check. That's not a claim that processing the entire archive would be trivial. And even if it was, whether that would make someone the "hero they want" is part of what's being called into question. So your silly demand going unmet prove…

> So your silly demand going unmet proves nothing. I made demands of no one. > Also, "give me an example please" is not a strawman! My identification of the strawman was that it referenced "find something hard" when I had said "be the hero they want" and that what is needed in this specific problem domain may be more difficult than what a generalization addresses. > If you actually want to prove something, you need t…

> I made demands of no one.

Whatever you want to call "If it's that easy, then do it"

> LLM's [...] Does that satisfy your demand?

That's a different argument from the one above where you were trying to contradict tptacek. And that argument is flawed itself. In particular, humans don't have guarantees either.

> provably incorrect results

This gets back to the actual request from earlier, which is showing an example where the machine performs below some human standard. Just pointing out that LLMs make mistakes is not enough proof of incorrectness in this specific use case.

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

#97
post #68
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pos…

My guess is because it’s the Smithsonian, they’re just not willing to trust an LLM’s transcription enough to put their name on it. I imagine they’re rather conservative. And maybe some AI-skeptic protectionist sentiments from the professional archivists. Seems like it could change with time though.

> My guess is because it’s the Smithsonian, they’re just not willing to trust an LLM’s transcription enough to put their name on it. I imagine they’re rather conservative

I expect thats a common theme from companies like that, yet I don't think they understand the issue they think they have there.

Why not have the LLMs do as much work as possible and have humans review and put their own name on it? Do you think they need to just trust and publish the output of the LLM wholeheartedly?

I think too many people saw what a few idiot lawyers did last year and closed the book on LLM usage.

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

#98
post #39

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 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 pos…

I'm doing some genealogy work right now on my family's old papers covering the time period from recent years back to the late 17th century. Handwriting styles changed a lot over the centuries and individuals can definitely be identified by their personal cursive style of writing and you can see their handwriting change as they aged.

Then you have the problem that some of these ancestors not only had terrible penmanship but also spelled multi-syllabic words phonetically since they likely were barely educated kids who spent more time when they were young working on the farm or ranch instead of attending school where they would've learned how to spell correctly.

I don't know whether your LLM can handle English words spelled phonetically written in cursive by an individual who had no consistency in forming letters in the words. It is clear after reading a lot of correspondence from this person that they ignored things that didn't seem important in the moment like dotting i's or crossing t's or forming tails on g's, p's, j's, or even beginning letters consistently since they switched between cursive and block letters within a sentence, maybe while they paused to clarify their thoughts. I don't know but it is fascinating to take a walk through life with someone you'll never meet and to discover that many of the things that seemed awesome to you as a kid were also awesome to them and that their life had so many challenges that our generations will never need to endure.

Some of my people have the most beautiful flowing cursive handwriting that looks like the cursive that I was taught in grade school. Others have the most beautiful flowing cursive with custom flourishes and adornments that make their handwriting instantly recognizable and easy to read once you understand their style.

I think there are plenty of edge cases where LLMs will take a drunkard's walk through the scribble and spit out gibberish.

I'm reminded of an old joke though.

Ronald Reagan woke up one snowy Washington, DC morning and took a look out of the window to admire the new-fallen snow. He enjoys the beautiful scene laid out before him until he sees tracks in the snow below his window and a message obviously written in piss that said - "Reagan sucks".

He dispatched the Secret Service to the site where samples were taken of the affected snow and photos of the tracks of two people were made.

After an investigation he receives a call from the Secret Service agent in charge who tells him he has some good news and some bad news for him.

The good news is that they know who pissed the message. It was George HW Bush, his Vice President. The bad news is that it was Nancy's handwriting.

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

#100
post #85

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 p…

The social post embedded in the page links directly to this page with all the instructions. Once I created an account and signed in I just selected a state in the original tab and was right there and could start translating.

Do you perhaps have uBlock Origin enabled or some other limitation on Javascript/cookies that might be messing with your login status?

The direct link to the mission that was in the social post. https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/missions/revoluti...

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