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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

#201

Post by coffeefirst »

electricant wrote: post #110

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?

I've heard in Europe the kids are taught script using fountain pens, which are actually faster when you don't pick up a pen.

In the US, 25+ years ago when cursive was taught, we were largely using pencils and crappy bic pens. At which point, you don't really get the benefit of staying in contact with the paper for longer.

This might be part of the disconnect.

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

#202

Post by Adachi91 »

epgui wrote: post #140

An army of pharmacists ought to do the trick!

A dying bread of them, perhaps before they retire.

I haven't seen a prescription pad in a decade, it's all electronic now in my part of the southern US, my current pharmacist is so young I don't know if they would even be able to read some of my previous providers writing.

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

#203

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #200
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you feed these to ChatGPT and tell me what it says they say? https://imgur.com/a/CDU6Lgs It gets them wrong for me, but maybe it will get them right for you. Maybe you're better at prompting or have access to a better model or something.

Eh, I was talking about OCR'ing modern English cursive handwriting, not translating medieval script written in a dead language. It seems reasonable to expect specialized models to be used for this type of work. Still, here's the first one, via Gemini 2.0 experimental: https://i.imgur.com/HtnwfHp.png How does the response look? Did it correctly identify the language as Old French, at least? Even if 100% made up, which…

> Did it correctly identify the language as Old French, at least

Yes! But that's the easy part. :)

> I was talking about OCR'ing modern English cursive handwriting

Yeah, see, I think that's a very narrow expectation. Archive paleography is substantially broader than that. I'm not saying that the tools are useless, but they're often still not better than humans directing focused care and attention.

> o1-pro, on the other hand, completely shat the bed

The result is absolutely hilarious though! So kudos to the model for making me laugh at least.

> 4o did pretty well

It is indeed pretty good and very impressive as a technological feat. The big problems I guess are:

1) Pretty good isn't necessarily good enough.

2) If one machine gets it right and one machine gets it wrong, can a machine reconcile them? Or must we again recruit humans?

3) If a machine seems to get a lot right but also clearly makes important factual errors in ways where a human looks and says "how could you possibly get this part wrong, of all things?" (like the year), how much do we trust and rely on it?

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

#204

Post by philipwhiuk »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #190
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really, because this entire post is about that last fraction of a %.

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

#205

Post by CamperBob2 »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #77
jahewson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solvable with the right tools. https://github.com/noCaptchaAi/NoCaptcha-Ai-Browser-Extensio...

> Solvable with the right tools. The original assertion was: I would challenge you to find a picture of text that you think a human can read and OCR cannot. Not if many CAPTCHA image challenges could be automated. Unless the tool referenced guarantees 100% correct solutions for all manipulated text images.

The AI models are now better at CAPTCHAs than I am, for both text- and image-based questions. But when confronted with a CAPTCHA, humans work for free, and the models don't. :(

As long as that's the case, CAPTCHAs probably won't be considered truly obsolete.

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

#207

Post by [deleted] »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #203
CamperBob2 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I was talking about OCR'ing modern English cursive handwriting, not translating medieval script written in a dead language. It seems reasonable to expect specialized models to be used for this type of work. Still, here's the first one, via Gemini 2.0 experimental: https://i.imgur.com/HtnwfHp.png How does the response look? Did it correctly identify the language as Old French, at least? Even if 100% made up, which…

> Did it correctly identify the language as Old French, at least Yes! But that's the easy part. :) > I was talking about OCR'ing modern English cursive handwriting Yeah, see, I think that's a very narrow expectation. Archive paleography is substantially broader than that. I'm not saying that the tools are useless, but they're often still not better than humans directing focused care and attention. > o1-pro, on the ot…

[deleted]

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

#208

Post by 999900000999 »

quickthrowman wrote: post #171
999900000999 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 percen…

I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Any reason for this being an American thing?

I'd still assume fine penmanship was a mark of the upper class though

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

#209

Post by CamperBob2 »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #203
CamperBob2 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I was talking about OCR'ing modern English cursive handwriting, not translating medieval script written in a dead language. It seems reasonable to expect specialized models to be used for this type of work. Still, here's the first one, via Gemini 2.0 experimental: https://i.imgur.com/HtnwfHp.png How does the response look? Did it correctly identify the language as Old French, at least? Even if 100% made up, which…

> Did it correctly identify the language as Old French, at least Yes! But that's the easy part. :) > I was talking about OCR'ing modern English cursive handwriting Yeah, see, I think that's a very narrow expectation. Archive paleography is substantially broader than that. I'm not saying that the tools are useless, but they're often still not better than humans directing focused care and attention. > o1-pro, on the ot…

The technique of pitting one model against another is usually pretty effective in my experience. If Gemini 2.0 Advanced and o1-pro agree on something, you can usually take it to the bank. If they don't, that's when human intervention is necessary, given the lack of additional first-rank models to query. (Edit: 1682 versus 1692 being a great example of something that a tiebreaker model could handle.)

It seems likely that a mixture-of-models approach like this will be a good thing to formalize at some level. Using appropriately-trained models to begin with seems even more important, though, and I can't agree that this type of content is relevant when discussing straightforward OCR tasks on modern languages.

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