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?
You do realize that you are posting on a thread whose OP thesis is that cursive is unreadable for most people.
Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
141–150 of 267 posts
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#142Is that true?! US kids don't learn cursive? How do they write?!
Those around me just write a lot more slowly, writing in print (they don’t connect the letters like in cursive, they can’t easily read my very-clean cursive either, which gives a feeling that my cursive is a sort of superpower)
I learned cursive in 2nd grade and was very strictly REQUIRED to use it up until high school, where they stopped requiring cursive.
1) My cursive was always slower than print. I was happy to go back to print so I could write fast. I went to school in the "analog" era, so 100% of all assignments were hand written and not typed.
2) I noticed that literally only 1 person in my school stayed with cursive when printing was an option. It was so unusual it stuck out.
3) I only know one person who writes cursive now in every day life even though 100% of us learned it in school.
4) That person is my dad and he writes in the style of these documents. If you gave me one of these documents and told me my dad wrote it, id believe you.
Which makes me think we all somehow were taught cursive wrong or practiced it wrong. My cursive was never fast and never looked like these documents.
Anyway, I found this, which summed up my feelings learning cursive perfectly
https://nautil.us/cursive-handwriting-and-other-education-my...
>Reading and literacy expert Randall Wallace, of Missouri State University, says “it seems odd and perhaps distracting that early readers, just getting used to decoding manuscript, would be asked to learn another writing style.”
I found it so frustrating that I just learned how to write one way and then they tell me that's not the "proper" way to write and we need to learn this other way to write.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#143Ok 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…
I wish this technique worked for me. I can transcribe something verbatim and then have absolutely no idea what I've written - I have to go back and read it to actually parse the text.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#144Is that true?! US kids don't learn cursive? How do they write?!
I learnt it here in Australia in my early school years, and hated it because it was both slower to write and more difficult to read. I switched back to standard writing as soon as I was allowed.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#145I 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.
I'm the founder of handwritingocr.com - have you checked out our free trial? We have loads of educators using our service for exactly this, and they seem quite happy with it.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#146Before 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…
Still, the fact that they’re combining AI and human effort makes sense
High quality human transcriptions are the most valuable kind of training data
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#147Is that true?! US kids don't learn cursive? How do they write?!
I learned cursive in elementary school in the US. But I went to a private Islamic school
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#148Earlier 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…
Did you actually check it? Sonnet 3.5 generates text that seems legitimate and generally correct, but misreads important details. LLMs are particularly deceptive because they will be internally consistent - they'll reuse the same incorrect name in both places and will hallucinate information that seems legit, but in fact is just made-up.
You don't use LLM but other transformer based ocr models like trocr which has very low CER and WER rates
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#149Earlier 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.
The article is from The Smithsonian. The actual project is with the National Archives.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#150They should ask a medical school for help ;) My family is Ivy-League, all the way, and has the worst goddamn cursive writing I've ever seen. It can take me an hour to read a Christmas card from my sister.
I've always wondered how pharmacists can read those prescriptions. There must be some kind of course in university that they followed.