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Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
181–190 of 267 posts
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#182[deleted]
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#183Curious, 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…
For me, the first sentence was almost immediately readable, I just had to slow down a bit to decipher the name
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#184Curious, 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’ve found much of the “reading” of cursive of my teachers was just basically snobbery. If it’s illegible but curly, well I just read it wrong! Illegible but straight, you makes it wrong!
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#185FWIW 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.
I'm the opposite. Dysgraphia rarely impacts my print writing, my cursive is an absolute mess of cludged up letters that are completely indecipherable.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
OCR is not perfect. And therefore it is not "solved".
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
From the article I linked:
“Our internal tests reveal a leap in accuracy from 98.97% to 99.56%, while customer test sets have shown an increase from 95.61% to 98.02%. In some cases where the document photos are unclear or poorly formatted, the accuracy could be improved by over 20% to 30%.”
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#188Curious, 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…
They're not "meant to be hard", they're just normal texts. The question is literally "can you read this?" because if you can: "Cool! Want to help transcribe it because the constraining factor when it comes to digitizing cursive is literally how many humans we can get to help out".
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#189Funnily enough, there have been a few times over the past couple of years I've been asked by younger co-workers to read something for them that was written in cursive. I hadn't really realized it had become such a (comparatively) rare skill. This fact is making me feel older than my actual 50th birthday did!
I'm a middle aged European and I have no issue reading the cursive handwriting shown there. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of (UK) senior citizens who would be thrilled to help out here. The retirement homes are filled with bored people eager to engage in anything.
Re: Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
OCR is not perfect. And therefore it is not "solved".
That definition, solved=perfect, is not what sandworm meant and it's an irrelevant definition to this conversation because it's an impossible standard.
Insisting we switch to that definition is just being unproductive and unhelpful. And it's pure semantics because you know what they meant.