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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

#171

Post by quickthrowman »

999900000999 wrote: post #71
jez wrote: post #16

The handwriting in some of these snippets, while sometimes difficult to read for one reason or another, is nonetheless beautiful: did everyone who wrote have such great handwriting back then? I'm looking at the piece in the Instagram post linked by the page, which begins, "honor of holding in their service". The lines are so straight, the letters are so uniform!

Widespread literacy is an extremely recent phenomenon. I highly doubt most people could write that well

The US is an extreme outlier with regards to a high rate of literacy compared to almost everywhere else during the 1600-1800s. Today is a different story, Massachusetts had a higher rate of literacy when education was made compulsory in the 19th century than it does currently, which is kind of astounding.

> Sheldon Richman quotes data showing that from 1650 to 1795, American male literacy climbed from 60 to 90 percent. Between 1800 and 1840 literacy in the North rose from 75 percent to between 91 and 97 percent. In the South the rate grew from about 55 percent to 81 percent. Richman also quotes evidence indicating that literacy in Massachusetts was 98 percent on the eve of legislated compulsion and is about 91 percent today.

https://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=307

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

#172

Post by dahart »

wriggler wrote: post #155
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…

From https://www.handwritingocr.com - seemed to be more accurate, mostly getting the New Mexican and possibly other parts: --- and I don't know whether it can be reset for a date in December or not. Cornell seemed anxious that it should not come off too close to Christmas, and of course New Mexican practice would support him. I will take this up with the Judge and with Hanna the moment I can get rid of the brief. Mea…

Looks entirely accurate except for the end. It’s interesting it didn’t catch “I am” or George’s name correctly, given how difficult some of the text is on this page.

Edit: Oh I see from another thread this OCR site is your creation. Nice work!

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

#173

Post by dahart »

electricant wrote: post #114
animal531 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In print? In general its faster to write and a lot easier to read, also you save time by not having to learn two different systems.

Let me disagree. IMHO cursive is faster than print once you get the hang of it. However my point is valid for print too I guess. Regarding time saved and the fact that they are two different systems, I don't get it. Time saved for what? They are not so different, cursive is built on top of print, just optimized for not lifting the pen from the paper too often (hence it is supposedly faster to write).

> However my point is valid for print too I guess.

What do you mean? You asked how kids can write without learning cursive, and print is the answer how. What is your point about print?

Cursive might be faster for an experienced writer (though Google tells me that claim is debatable), but it takes a long time to get there. I learned cursive as a child, used it for years, and it was never faster than printing, it was much slower. When I say ‘print’, I use an in-between style of half-cursive fast print that isn’t cursive but a lot of people use in practice, and it’s much faster for me that trying to write legible cursive.

However cursive is neither faster nor more legible to read, as evidenced by this article and the pages that need translating. If we’re going to compare cursive and print, the metric should be overall speed and accuracy of communication, not how many milliseconds the pen-holder can save while writing something nobody can read.

Today, it no longer matters. People type & text mostly, and typing is way faster than either cursive or print. The number of situations that require handwriting continues to decline. We don’t use handwriting enough anymore to develop cursive fluency and efficiency.

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

#174

Post by gdubs »

FWIW since so many people here seem set on the idea that cursive is archaic / useless today, Montessori schools still teach cursive before print because the flowing letters are easier for kids and more similar to drawing, and all the exercises they do around letter tracing.

The result is that kids in Montessori learn to read faster and earlier. (They're usually writing in cursive first, which gives them a foundation of the letters and their phonetic sounds, before they begin reading exercises in earnest.)

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

#175

Post by ternnoburn »

gdubs wrote: post #174

FWIW since so many people here seem set on the idea that cursive is archaic / useless today, Montessori schools still teach cursive before print because the flowing letters are easier for kids and more similar to drawing, and all the exercises they do around letter tracing. The result is that kids in Montessori learn to read faster and earlier. (They're usually writing in cursive first , which gives them a foundation…

Kids with dysgraphia sometimes can successfully write in cursive and cannot write in block letters. I don't know where I fall on how hard it should be taught, generally, but it's clearly very helpful to some kids.

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

#176

Post by astura »

awithrow wrote: post #154
kopirgan wrote: post #126

Is that true?! US kids don't learn cursive? How do they write?!

I'm in the US and learned it in school. I just never really needed to use it consistently. Assignments and papers that were still handwritten could be done either way. Cursive never felt noticeably faster for me to write. I'm sure it would have had I been forced to do it. By the time I was in high school (1999), i remember typing most long form assignments. Now the only time I ever read cursive is on letters from my…

>Cursive never felt noticeably faster for me to write. I'm sure it would have had I been forced to do it.

I was forced to use cursive and it was still slower than print.

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

#177

Post by iterance »

lukeschlather wrote: post #159
sandworm101 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an LLM problem. It was solved years ago via OCR. Worldwide, postal services long ago deployed OCR to read handwitten addresses. And there was an entire industry of OCR-based data entry services, much of it translating the chicken scratch of doctor's handwiting on medical forms, long before LLMs were a thing.

LLMs improve significantly on state of the art OCR. LLMs can do contextual analysis. If I were transcribing these by hand, I would probably feed them through OCR + an LLM, then ask an LLM to compare my transcription to its transcription and comment on any discrepancies. I wouldn't be surprised if I offered minimal improvement over just having the LLM do it though.

Are you guessing, or are there results somewhere that demonstrate how LLMs improve OCR in practical applications?

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

#178

Post by prng2021 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #157
prng2021 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Determining whether the latest off the shelf LLMs are good enough should be straight forward because of this: “Some participants have dedicated years of their lives to the program—like Alex Smith, a retiree from Pennsylvania. Over nine years, he transcribed more than 100,000 documents” Have different LLMs transcribe those same documents and compare to see if the human or machine is or accurate and by how much.

This is not an LLM problem. It was solved years ago via OCR. Worldwide, postal services long ago deployed OCR to read handwitten addresses. And there was an entire industry of OCR-based data entry services, much of it translating the chicken scratch of doctor's handwiting on medical forms, long before LLMs were a thing.

It was never “solved” unless you can point me to OCR software that is 100% accurate. You can take 5 seconds to google “ocr with llm” and find tons of articles explaining how LLMs can enhance OCR. Here’s an example:

https://trustdecision.com/resources/blog/revolutionizing-ocr...

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

#179

Post by sandworm101 »

prng2021 wrote: post #178
sandworm101 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an LLM problem. It was solved years ago via OCR. Worldwide, postal services long ago deployed OCR to read handwitten addresses. And there was an entire industry of OCR-based data entry services, much of it translating the chicken scratch of doctor's handwiting on medical forms, long before LLMs were a thing.

It was never “solved” unless you can point me to OCR software that is 100% accurate. You can take 5 seconds to google “ocr with llm” and find tons of articles explaining how LLMs can enhance OCR. Here’s an example: https://trustdecision.com/resources/blog/revolutionizing-ocr...

By that standard, no problem has ever been solved by anyone. I prefer to believe that a great many everyday tech issues were in fact tackled and solved in the past by people who had never even heard of LLMs. So too many things were done in finance long before blockchains solved everything for us.

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

#180

Post by MarkusWandel »

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 course haven't written (or read) much of it in the decades since.

It took about one minute to decipher the first sentence in the sample. Is that considered good these days?

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