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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

#241

Post by kopirgan »

astura wrote: post #226
kopirgan wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting.. Frankly did not know most of what's said in replies.. That it's not compulsorily taught and more surprisingly it's slower to write! I thought having to lift pen repeatedly would be slower? Anyway I need to try to really know I guess! Versus the time taken to add those extra links. Like most others I've not written much in years perhaps decades, that has screwed up my handwriting as even minor notes…

>I thought having to lift pen repeatedly would be slower? The extra strokes required for all those fucking loops more than make up for having to pick up the pen. Cursive probably made a lot of sense when people were writing with quill pens, but in modern times each individual has their own comfort level and preferences. >Cleared a few misconceptions... One of them being writing in blocks is somewhat 'childish' and cu…

I'm not sure if it's related to how kids are taught to hold the pen. And the pen itself. In India as a kid, that was really long back, ball pens banned, you had to use fountain pens. And I hold the pen like it's featured in most pen ads.

When I spent time in East, like Singapore, Malaysia I was shocked to see people holding pens like they're about to stab the paper. Even kids. But I did learn they also had fountain pens only rule for a long while before relaxing.

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

#242

Post by Boldened15 »

elmomle wrote: post #239
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

point me to handwriting that is 100% legible... If 100% is your standard, good luck solving anything ever.

Most handwriting is legible to its owner. This would indicate that there is enough consistency within a person's writing style to differentiate letters, etc., even if certain assumptions about resemblance to any standard may not hold. I wonder if there are modern OCR methods that incorporate old code-breaking techniques like frequency analysis.

> Most handwriting is legible to its owner.

Not necessarily, I'd be surprised if I could fully understand my old handwritten notes from when I was in school (years ago), since I've always had messy handwriting and no longer have the context in each subject matter to guess.

LLMs could help in some of those cases, since it would have knowledge of history/chemistry/etc. and could fill in the blanks better than I could at this point. Though the hallucinations would no doubt outweigh it.

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

#243

Post by Dylan16807 »

jadamson wrote: post #233
Dylan16807 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not, because then they wouldn't want humans, because humans can't do 100% either.

That's only true if the x% humans can't do is the same x% that OCR can't do.

I know it matters what percent humans can do. But specifically "that last fraction of a percent" is in comparison to 100, not to humans. The argument I was replying to was about perfection, and rejecting anything short of it. Comparing to humans is a much better idea, and removes the entire argument of "OCR literally can't be that good so the problem isn't solved".

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

#244

Post by beala »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #180

Curious, how hard is the sample in the article meant to be? I grew up (in the 1970s) in a world in which cursive still ruled. But the variant that we were taught in school was already considerably evolved from the one used by my grandparents, and those were modern compared to the archaic German script ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin ) so I've never thought of myself as good at reading cursive. And of c…

I learned cursive in school (born in the 80s), and the first sample was indecipherable.

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

#245

Post by thaumasiotes »

rtkwe wrote: post #240
thaumasiotes wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this example which is a mix of barely legible hand written cursive and easy to read typed form. > In fact it seems to mix up some portions of the latter half of the typed text with the written text in the portion of it's "transcription" about "reduced and indigent circumstances". What typed form? What typed text? That image is a single handwritten page, and the writing is quite clean, not "barely legible".† The fil…

What? I pulled one page out of the image set and tried to get GPT 4o to transcribe it. I wasn't just using the easy example from the original article, it's an easy example to draw people into the idea of participating in the volunteer effort. If it were one of the inscrutable documents people would be more likely to be put off the effort. Did the link in my comment not take you to a single page (I just tested it in i…

No, if I follow the link in your comment, I get a very different image, this one: https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/17/...

(page 8 of "Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application File W. 7785, John Hopper, N.C.")

I agree that your description of the image the link shows you, which appears to be page 52 of the same file, makes sense. I can read ... some of the handwritten words. None of the long ones.

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

#246

Post by thaumasiotes »

teddyh wrote: post #124
seletskiy wrote: post #109

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…

A “Teapot trial” is not actually that farfetched: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Teapot_Dome_scand... >

Unless you're looking at the writing, that is.

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

#247

Post by DidYaWipe »

geuis wrote: 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…

"and even gently requires you to have two forms of 2FA"

WTF, why? I'm not putting my bank info in there. The whole process sounds like a PITA in several ways, but in general I'm getting fed up with no-importance sites requiring 2FA as if they're a brokerage.

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

#248

Post by jeffbee »

demosthanos wrote: post #30

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…

Drives me crazy that they are saying "AI and OCR". It sucks that charlatans have occupied the field of "AI" so thoroughly now that OCR is considered something separate.

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

#249

Post by pixl97 »

miltonlost wrote: post #223
Dylan16807 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're wrong, but that's because there are no alternative technologies. The only alternative is leaving much more of the archive inaccessible for a much longer period, possibly forever.

> The only alternative is leaving much more of the archive inaccessible for a much longer period, possibly forever. No, the alternative is volunteers transcribing. Like this project. Not every problem needs a computer.

In a world that keeps people working, entertained, or sleeping, the total number of volunteers out there is likely pretty small and easily burned out.
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