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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

#231

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

Volunteers transcribing leaves much more of the archive inaccessible for a much longer period.

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

#232

Post by Dylan16807 »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #204
Dylan16807 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 %.

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

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

#233

Post by jadamson »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #232
philipwhiuk wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#234

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

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...

point me to handwriting that is 100% legible...

If 100% is your standard, good luck solving anything ever.

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

#236

Post by makeitdouble »

Daneel_ wrote: post #143
Unearned5161 wrote: post #78

Ok 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.

That's my whole school life. Bonus difficulty as it was pen and paper, my writing sucked enough that I couldn't read back a bunch of it. I also couldn't read half of the cursive in this project, I'm really bad at that.

It worked better when I realized I could stop taking most notes.

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

#237

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

There seems to be a whole cultural battle pitting people who don't give a damn, and hardcore cursive fans who will make shift studies after studies to somewhat prove that cursive is the bees' knees. I get the feeling Montessori would mostly appeal to the later crowd.

Somewhere in it there must be real science, but damn is it hard to find.

At this point I'm more prone to take an out of context look, and try to assert what exactly happened where cursive got phased out, or more generally, how it goes for cultures that don't teach cursive at all.

For instance do Korean kids face severe issues because cursive hangul isn't taught in school ?

If not, we can go back looking at it like a preference or an alternative that can help in very specific scenarii.

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

#238

Post by manquer »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #234
prng2021 wrote: post #178

Earlier 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...

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

I think OP is saying there is always scope for improvement until it is 100% not that 100% or bust .

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

#239

Post by elmomle »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #234
prng2021 wrote: post #178

Earlier 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...

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.

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

#240

Post by rtkwe »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #218
rtkwe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One that require additional work beyond simply feeding the image into the model would be this example which is a mix of barely legible hand written cursive and easy to read typed form. [0] Initially 4o just transcribes (successfully) the bottom half of the text and has to be prompted to attempt the top half at which point it seems to at best summarize the text instead of giving a direct transcription. [1] In fact it…

> 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 incognito mode too..)? For me it's this image [0] and no I tried just this one page and it didn't do well. If you can get it to work let me know the prompt it was late for me and it

[0] https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/17/...

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