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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!
I highly doubt most people could write that well
> particularly for Americans who never learned cursive in school. American schools don’t teach it anymore?!
Why would they? It’s an anachronism optimizing for writing speed
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can Considering the people involved are experts in their field, are certainly aware of OCR capabilities, and have publicized a need thusly: ... the National Archives is looking for volunteers who can help transcribe and organize its many handwritten records ... Perhaps "random humans" can perform tasks which could reshape your belief: > OCR is VERY good
No. Sign up and look at the current missions. A lot of what they want transcribed is totally straightforward to OCR --- not even LLM, OCR. Whatever's going on, and I'm not second-guessing them, a pretty big chunk of their problem appears to be well within the state of the art. The appeal to authority isn't going to play here, because you can just click through to the archives and see what they're trying to figure out…
If it's that easy, then do it and be the hero they want.
Or maybe, just maybe, "a pretty big chunk of their problem appears to be well within the state of the art" is a sweeping generalization lacking understanding of the difficulties involved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not too sure about that reading, I got "The following is the declaration of James Lambert a soldier of the Revolutionary War in South America." rather different
I got “North America”
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!
I also remember teachers telling you when writing cursive to seldom lift your hand from the page. I think that act of keeping your pen on the page for most of the writing process encourages a smoother and more natural flow, reducing the chance of jerky, uneven strokes
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Sign up and look at the current missions. A lot of what they want transcribed is totally straightforward to OCR --- not even LLM, OCR. Whatever's going on, and I'm not second-guessing them, a pretty big chunk of their problem appears to be well within the state of the art. The appeal to authority isn't going to play here, because you can just click through to the archives and see what they're trying to figure out…
> No. Sign up and look at the current missions. A lot of what they want transcribed is totally straightforward to OCR --- not even LLM, OCR. Whatever's going on, and I'm not second-guessing them, a pretty big chunk of their problem appears to be well within the state of the art. If it's that easy, then do it and be the hero they want. Or maybe, just maybe, "a pretty big chunk of their problem appears to be well withi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would challenge you to find a picture of text that you think a human can read and OCR cannot. Are you aware of CAPTCHA[0] images? 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA
Solvable with the right tools. https://github.com/noCaptchaAi/NoCaptcha-Ai-Browser-Extensio...
The original assertion was:
I would challenge you to find a picture of text
that you think a human can read and OCR cannot.
Before 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…
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…
Edit: apparently it’s called cross writing [1]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No. Sign up and look at the current missions. A lot of what they want transcribed is totally straightforward to OCR --- not even LLM, OCR. Whatever's going on, and I'm not second-guessing them, a pretty big chunk of their problem appears to be well within the state of the art. If it's that easy, then do it and be the hero they want. Or maybe, just maybe, "a pretty big chunk of their problem appears to be well withi…
Go ahead and find something hard, and relate back the steps you took to find it.
This is a strawman[0] argument. You proclaimed:
A lot of what they want transcribed is totally
straightforward to OCR
If it's that easy, then do it and be the hero
they want.