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Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
by lemonberry
It's a really interesting project. But boy do they make it hard to participate.
* Article doesn't provide a direct link to the topic mission
* Signup is pretty easy. Well organized and even gently requires you to have two forms of 2FA.
* Sign up complete. Go back to the primary page and try to find the mission. A little buried but not too deep.
* Notice I'm not signed in. Ok, let's do that. Now I'm back on the main page and navigate back. Find the first document and open it. Really interesting to scan through the doc and to read. People back then generally had really nice handwriting.
* Ok, what next, how do I transcribe? ... ? Oh it says I'm not logged in again. Fine, click the link and...
* I'm logged in and directed back to the main page, again.
Look, this is an interesting project and I'd love to spend my spare cycles to help out. But they really need to clean up this process.
Volunteers shouldn't have to jump through kinda poorly designed interfaces to help out.
The social post embedded in the page links directly to this page with all the instructions. Once I created an account and signed in I just selected a state in the original tab and was right there and could start translating.
Do you perhaps have uBlock Origin enabled or some other limitation on Javascript/cookies that might be messing with your login status?
The direct link to the mission that was in the social post. https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/missions/revoluti...
I had the exact same experience when I tried to contribute last week. I had to jump between multiple sessions and browsers and eventually managed to log in after about 30 minutes of trying. There is no indication of what is going right or wrong. Once you're in the UI changes very little as well so it's quite easy to miss that you've managed to log in.
Once I was logged in I spent another 45 minutes trying to find a document to transcribe. Every single one I found or was given from a challenge had either already been transcribed or was a typewritten document or manifest that the OCR had already done an OK job with. I reviewed a few documents for accuracy, closed the browser, and never went back.
It's a shame it's so hard to use. I really was hoping for something I could pop open for 15-30 minutes a day as a break from work and contribute to instead of doing a crossword or watching a video.
"and even gently requires you to have two forms of 2FA"
WTF, why? I'm not putting my bank info in there. The whole process sounds like a PITA in several ways, but in general I'm getting fed up with no-importance sites requiring 2FA as if they're a brokerage.
[dead]
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 especially easy document to read precisely because it's meant to be the hook to get people to sign up and get started. It isn't going to be representative of the full breadth of documents that the National Archives want people to go through.
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 post post-1900 and all typeset. They're blurry, but 4o cuts through them like a hot knife through butter.
My parents have saved letters from their parents which are written in cursive but in two perpendicular layers. Meaning the writing goes horizontally in rows and then when they got to the end of the page it was turned 90 degrees and continued right on top of what was already there for the whole page. This was apparently to save paper and postage. It looks like an unintelligible jumble but my mother can actually decipher it. Maybe that’s what the LLMs are having trouble with?
Edit: apparently it’s called cross writing [1]
Are they having trouble? You can sign up right now and get tasks from the archive that seem trivial for 4o (by which I mean: feed a screenshot to 4o, get a transcription, and spot check it).
Did you actually check it? Sonnet 3.5 generates text that seems legitimate and generally correct, but misreads important details. LLMs are particularly deceptive because they will be internally consistent - they'll reuse the same incorrect name in both places and will hallucinate information that seems legit, but in fact is just made-up.
You don't use LLM but other transformer based ocr models like trocr which has very low CER and WER rates
Just have version control, and allow randomized spot checks with experts to have a known error rate.
> 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?
Possibly for the reason that came up in your other post: you mentioned that you spot checked the result.
Back when I was in historical research, and occasionally involved in transcription projects, the standard was 2-3 independent transcriptions per document.
Maybe the National Archive will pass documents to an LLM and use the output as 1 of their 2-3 transcriptions. It could reduce how many duplicate transcriptions are done by humans. But I'll be surprised if they jump to accepting spot checked LLM output anytime soon.
You get that I'm not saying they should just commit LLM outputs as transcriptions, right?
My guess is because it’s the Smithsonian, they’re just not willing to trust an LLM’s transcription enough to put their name on it. I imagine they’re rather conservative. And maybe some AI-skeptic protectionist sentiments from the professional archivists. Seems like it could change with time though.
> My guess is because it’s the Smithsonian, they’re just not willing to trust an LLM’s transcription enough to put their name on it. I imagine they’re rather conservative
I expect thats a common theme from companies like that, yet I don't think they understand the issue they think they have there.
Why not have the LLMs do as much work as possible and have humans review and put their own name on it? Do you think they need to just trust and publish the output of the LLM wholeheartedly?
I think too many people saw what a few idiot lawyers did last year and closed the book on LLM usage.
> Why not have the LLMs do as much work as possible and have humans review and put their own name on it?
That's not a good way to improve on the accuracy of the LLM. Humans reviewing work that is 95% accurate are mostly just going to rubber-stamp whatever you show them. This is equally a problem for humans reviewing the work of other humans.
What you actually want, if you're worried about accuracy, is to do the same work multiple times independently and then compare results.
The incident with the lawyers just highlighted the fundamental problem with LLMs and AI in general. They can't be trusted for anything serious. Worse, they give the apppearence of being correct, which leads humans "checkers" into complacency. Total dumpster fire.
Instead of thinking about this as an all-or-nothing outcome, consider how this might work if they were made accessible with LLMs, and then you used randomized spot checks with experts to create a clear and public error rate. Then, when people see mistakes they can fix them.
I’m trying to do this for old Latin books at the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam. So many of the books have never been digitized, let alone OCRd or translated. There is a huge amount of work to be done to make these works accessible.
LLMs won’t make it perfect. But isn’t perfect the enemy of the good? If we make it an ongoing project where the source image material is easily accessible (unlike in a normal published translation, where you just have to trust the translator), then the knowledge and understanding can improve over time.
This approach also has the benefit of training readers not to believe everything they read — but to question it and try to get directly at the source. I think that’s a beautiful outcome.
These kinds of ideas just sound to me like "Suppose you had to use broken technology X. How do you make work?"
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.
In a world that keeps people working, entertained, or sleeping, the total number of volunteers out there is likely pretty small and easily burned out.
Volunteers transcribing leaves much more of the archive inaccessible for a much longer period.
The article is from The Smithsonian. The actual project is with the National Archives.
I'm doing some genealogy work right now on my family's old papers covering the time period from recent years back to the late 17th century. Handwriting styles changed a lot over the centuries and individuals can definitely be identified by their personal cursive style of writing and you can see their handwriting change as they aged.
Then you have the problem that some of these ancestors not only had terrible penmanship but also spelled multi-syllabic words phonetically since they likely were barely educated kids who spent more time when they were young working on the farm or ranch instead of attending school where they would've learned how to spell correctly.
I don't know whether your LLM can handle English words spelled phonetically written in cursive by an individual who had no consistency in forming letters in the words. It is clear after reading a lot of correspondence from this person that they ignored things that didn't seem important in the moment like dotting i's or crossing t's or forming tails on g's, p's, j's, or even beginning letters consistently since they switched between cursive and block letters within a sentence, maybe while they paused to clarify their thoughts. I don't know but it is fascinating to take a walk through life with someone you'll never meet and to discover that many of the things that seemed awesome to you as a kid were also awesome to them and that their life had so many challenges that our generations will never need to endure.
Some of my people have the most beautiful flowing cursive handwriting that looks like the cursive that I was taught in grade school. Others have the most beautiful flowing cursive with custom flourishes and adornments that make their handwriting instantly recognizable and easy to read once you understand their style.
I think there are plenty of edge cases where LLMs will take a drunkard's walk through the scribble and spit out gibberish.
I'm reminded of an old joke though.
Ronald Reagan woke up one snowy Washington, DC morning and took a look out of the window to admire the new-fallen snow. He enjoys the beautiful scene laid out before him until he sees tracks in the snow below his window and a message obviously written in piss that said - "Reagan sucks".
He dispatched the Secret Service to the site where samples were taken of the affected snow and photos of the tracks of two people were made.
After an investigation he receives a call from the Secret Service agent in charge who tells him he has some good news and some bad news for him.
The good news is that they know who pissed the message. It was George HW Bush, his Vice President. The bad news is that it was Nancy's handwriting.
I don't know about this project, but I can easily find thousands of images that gpt-4o can't read, but a human expert can. It can do typed text excellently, antika-style cursive if it's very neat, and kurrent-style cursive never.
For straightforward reasons, I am commenting on this project, not the space of all possible projects. I did try, once, to get 4o to decode the Zodiac Killer's message. It didn't work.
The point is that gpt-4o can't read cursive very well. The chain of thought reasoning doesn't seem to help at all. It's a thing the model doesn't generalize to, that's relevant to this discussion.
I'm sure you can find something it does a bad job on (have you, though?) but it's done swimmingly on some really horrendous 18th century examples I've found. Among other obvious things, it translates the Revolutionary War cursive that leads off this article.
I think people may be kidding themselves a little bit about this stuff.
I wish! I do genealogy, I would love automated transcription of historical documents. Have I? Oh yes! It wasn't rhetorical that I could find you thousands of pages. Here's one book if you want a link: https://media.digitalarkivet.no/view/166325/4
But every time I find something that I think "This one is surely easy enough!" it's usually wrong. US revolutionary war cursive is on the easy end; it's quite similar to modern cursive, and what is of training data in the datasets is probably a lot like it, if not actually in it - historians who test this complain about overfitting. Which I believe, because as I said, I see that it's bad at generalizing.
Real quick, how long do you think chatgpto4 has existed? How long do you think the National Archive has been archiving?
It's 4o. The crowdsourced transcription project dates back to 2012. My comment is mostly on this article.
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 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".
[0] https://catalog.archives.gov/id/54921817?objectPage=8&object...
[1] Reproducing here since I cannot share the chat since it has user uploaded images. " The text in the top half of the image is handwritten and partially difficult to read due to its cursive style and some smudging. Here's my best transcription attempt for the top section:
...resident within four? years, swears and says that the name of the John Hopper mentioned in the foregoing declaration is the same person, and he verily believes the facts as stated in the declaration are true.
He further swears that the said John Hopper is in reduced and indigent circumstances and requires the aid of his country.
The declarant further swears he has no evidence now in his power of service, except the statement of Capt. (illegible name), as to his reduced circumstances ...
Sworn to before me, this day...
Some parts remain unclear due to the handwriting, but let me know if you'd like me to attempt further clarification on specific sections!"
> 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 file related to John Hopper appears to be 59 pages, and some of them are typed, but they're all separate images.
Are you trying to process all 59 pages at once? Why?
I should note that transcription is an excellent use of an LLM in the sense of a language model, as opposed to an "LLM" in the sense of several different pieces of software hooked together in cryptic ways. It would be a lot more useful, for this task, to have direct access to the language model backing 4o than to have access to a chatbot prompt that intermediates between you and the model.
† My biggest problems in reading the page: Cursive n and u are often identical glyphs (both written и), leading me to read "Ind." as "Jud."; and I had trouble with the "roster" at the bottom of the page. What felt weirdest about that was that the crossbar of the "t" is positioned well above the top of the stem, but that can't actually be what tripped me up, because on further review it's a common feature of the author's handwriting that I didn't even notice until I got to the very end of the letter. It's even true in the earlier instance of "Roster" higher up on the page. So my best guess is that the "os" doesn't look right to me.
I misread 1758 as 1958, too, but hopefully (a) that kind of thing wears off as you get used to reading documents about the Revolutionary War; and (b) it's a red flag when someone who died in 1838 was born in 1958 according to a letter written in 1935.
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/...
No, if I follow the link in your comment, I get a very different image, this one: https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/17/...
(page 8 of "Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application File W. 7785, John Hopper, N.C.")
I agree that your description of the image the link shows you, which appears to be page 52 of the same file, makes sense. I can read ... some of the handwritten words. None of the long ones.
Very very strange. It's been giving me the same image for the whole time including over multiple devices. The one you link is #52 for me.
Anyways yes that handwritten text is an example where LLMs just cant hack it and people seem to be able to. There's a pretty thorough transcript of the upper handwritten portion of the page I was referencing available from a user. It's a great example of why you can't just throw an LLM at problems like this. At best they're a tool people can use to transcribe loads of them quickly but it still needs to be hand checked for accuracy, completeness, and relevance.
> Like if this is a crowdsourcing project...
I'm confused by what you're asking. Are you asking me to like (upvote) your comment if this is a crowdsourcing project? Don't we already know it is a crowdsourcing project?
The use of the word “like” here could be replaced with the word “so”
“So if this is a crowdsourcing project…”
Like is serving as an indication that someone else approximately said the phrase it introduced, in a way often associated with the “Valley Girl” social dialect but regularly seen outside of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like#As_a_colloquial_quotative
> The use of the word “like” here could be replaced with the word “so”
Correct, but that's not a quotative use of the word. It's a discourse particle. You want to link one subsection down, like as a discourse particle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like#As_a_discourse_particle,_...
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...
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 very bad.
As an example look at subtitle rips for DVD and Blu-ray. The discs store them as images of rendered computer text. A popular format for rippers is SRT, where it will be stored as utf-8 and rendered by the player. So when you rip subtitles, there's an OCR step.
These are computer rendered text in a small handful of fonts. And decent OCR still chokes on it often.
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%.”
In my experience the chatbots have bumped transcription accuracy quite a bit. (Of course, it's possible I just don't have access to the best-in-class OCR software I should be comparing against).
(I always go over the transcript by hand, but I'd have to do that with OCR anyway).
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 %.
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.
I know it matters what percent humans can do. But specifically "that last fraction of a percent" is in comparison to 100, not to humans. The argument I was replying to was about perfection, and rejecting anything short of it. Comparing to humans is a much better idea, and removes the entire argument of "OCR literally can't be that good so the problem isn't solved".
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.
> Most handwriting is legible to its owner.
Not necessarily, I'd be surprised if I could fully understand my old handwritten notes from when I was in school (years ago), since I've always had messy handwriting and no longer have the context in each subject matter to guess.
LLMs could help in some of those cases, since it would have knowledge of history/chemistry/etc. and could fill in the blanks better than I could at this point. Though the hallucinations would no doubt outweigh it.
I think OP is saying there is always scope for improvement until it is 100% not that 100% or bust .
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.
Why assume that OCR does not involve context? OCR systems regularly use context. It doesnt require an LLM for a machine reading medical forms to generate and use a list of the hundred most common drugs appearing in a paticular place on a specific form. And an OCR reading envelopes can be directed to prefer numbers or letters depending on what it expects.
Even if LLMs can push a 99.9% accuracy to 99.99, at least an OCR-based system can be audited. Ask an OCR vendor why the machine confused "Vancouver WA" and "Vancouver CA" and one can get a solid answer based in repeated testing. Ask an LLM vendor why and, at best, you'll get a shrug and some line citing how much better they were in all the other situations.
Are you guessing, or are there results somewhere that demonstrate how LLMs improve OCR in practical applications?
Someone linked this above
https://trustdecision.com/resources/blog/revolutionizing-ocr...
> 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%.
While a small percentage increase, when applied to massive amounts of text it’s a big deal.
It's not a small percentage. The moment you OCR a book, you'll end up with hundreds to thousands of errors.
Comment was deleted :(
For the addresses it might be a bit easier because they are a lot more structured and in theory and the vocabulary is a lot more limited. I’m less sure about medical notes although I’d suspect that there are fairly common things they are likely to say.
Looking at the (admittedly single) example from the National Archives seems a bit more open than perhaps the other two examples. It’s not impossible thst LLMs could help with this
Yes, but there was usually a fall-back mechanism where an unrecognized address would be shown on a screen to an employee who would type it so that it could then be inkjetted with a barcode.
Fun fact, convolutional neural networks developed by Yann LeCunn were instrumental in that roll out!
Agree. Sounds like not wanting to let go of a legacy
Something about extraordinary claims and extraordinary evidence? The evidence presented, a seemingly easily transcribed image, is hardly persuasive.
Some are significantly harder to read. I took the page below and tried to get GPT 4o to transcribe it and it basically couldn't do it. I'm not going to sit and prompt hack for ages to see if it can but it seems unable to tackle the handwritten text at the top. When I first just fed it the image and asked for a transcription it only (but successfully) read the bottom portion, prompted for a transcription of the top it dropped into more of a summary of the whole document mainly pulling some phrases from the bottom text. (Sadly can't share it but I copied it's reply out in a comment upthread) [0]
It was more successful at a few others I tried but it's still a task that requires manual processing like a lot of LLM output to check for accuracy and prompt modification to get it to output what you need for some documents.
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/54921817?objectPage=8&object...
Comment was deleted :(
Drives me crazy that they are saying "AI and OCR". It sucks that charlatans have occupied the field of "AI" so thoroughly now that OCR is considered something separate.
Still, the fact that they’re combining AI and human effort makes sense
High quality human transcriptions are the most valuable kind of training data
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 tremendous memory-stick. This is not surprising, considering that you are dedicating an inordinate amount of time per page, but it's a welcome side effect when you try and recollect.
> 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 tremendous memory-stick. This is not surprising, considering that you are dedicating an inordinate amount of time per page, but it's a welcome side effect when you try and recollect.
This was something I enjoyed when I decided to learn a language by translating short stories. (Edit: Of course, you have to choose an author whose diction you respect. Your unfamiliarity with the target language encourages you to mull over the author's use of diction and the nuances the author is trying to convey, and then find appropriate diction in English. This means you spend a long time immersed in the imagery.)
What a brilliant idea. I've had learning to read French on my list for a while now, I'm going to try transcription as another way at it.
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 not uncommon. I was the same way back when I took an actual typing class. The part of my brain used for storage/recall just seems to go to sleep when doing the whole transcription stage. Maybe it was a mental thing realizing it was just a task and no actual interest in the content other than accomplishing a task vs doing it something I had a vested interest???
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.
I love the idea of "synchronizing" with someone’s handwriting
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 be reviewed and proof-read by human? — Also yes.
---
Here subtle one: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/34384201?objectPage=40
Here is (one of) transcripts made by `o1-pro`:
(2)
…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 up too close to Christmas,
and of course new suspicion [would be aroused?] [about?] him.
I will take this up with the Judge as soon as I can get rid of the brief.
Meanwhile I would like to know whether there is anything else
in which I can be useful to you, since it behooves me
in ways of uncomfortable relations with the present management.
Are you going East in December?
Has any word come from Hagerman?
Were there any noteworthy developments at the hearings
on the [Teapot?] trial?
I have no inclination yet whether Wheeler will be wanted in
Washington, but the chances are that he will not.
With regards to all the brethren and [flock?], I am
very sincerely yours,
George A. H. Fraser
Somehow GPT-4o performs better on this example and fails only on "New Mexican practise" part.
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. Meanwhile I would like to know whether there is anything else in which I can be useful to you, since it behooves me to be diligent in view of uncomfortable relations with the present management.
Are you going East in December?
Has any word come from Hagerman?
Were there any noteworthy developments at the hearings on the Tenorio tract?
I have no intimation yet whether I will be wanted in Washington, but the chances are that I will not.
With regards to all the brethren and flock, Dan
Very sincerely yours, George H. H. Baser
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!
Consider using the reply feature so that your comment appears in context.
Also your link goes to the wrong page. Here’s the right one: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/34384201?objectPage=190
A “Teapot trial” is not actually that farfetched: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Teapot_Dome_scand...>
Unless you're looking at the writing, that is.
I don't have "unwavering" trust in OCR and LLM.
cheers! I was looking for something semi productive to sink a Friday night into
on a more serious note, working through a transcription project for letters and journals that nobody has touched since they've been archived is such a wonderful feeling. Aside from being in front of the physical document itself, your degree of separation from the writer and point is time is vanishingly small!
I always like to observe when they cross something out or make a mistake and think about what could have caused that. Did a friend pass by the door and scare them? Did they get distracted looking out the window? It's all so close and yet so far away :)
Seems like something that some of those big AI companies that are desperately starved of training material could chip in on, no? Actually do something for the public good, spend a few cents of that VC money, get some high-quality training data out of it?
They should ask a medical school for help ;)
My family is Ivy-League, all the way, and has the worst goddamn cursive writing I've ever seen. It can take me an hour to read a Christmas card from my sister.
I've always wondered how pharmacists can read those prescriptions. There must be some kind of course in university that they followed.
I think with experience they know how each medicine is usually written? It's often easier to listen/read when you already know what it is about.
A lot of it is understanding the abbreviations.
"2T BD IAF UF", 2 tablets, twice a day, immediately after food until, finished"
Not really a problem anymore, it's all been digitized at least for the most part.
I’m interested to give this a go because I want to practice reading cursive. I do a lot of longhand writing including writing all my notes in cursive. It’s exciting to watch my binding fill up with all sorts of different subjects!
I like to write in cursive for a few reasons
1. I find it makes my hand cramp less 2. It offers some shallow privacy in public 3. I don’t want to lose the skill 4. It’s fun!
All of the same reasons I love practicing a little calligraphy! I love how it looks as well. I don’t use a special pen but just add my own style to my cursive to make it look even nicer. But I used to write my notes in school with calligraphy (mostly because it gave me an excuse to not care about the subject) but it made the teachers hate me because I would never finish copying their scribbles fast enough.
This is all very cool so I’m not trying to be dismissive. In a lot of ways, giving a hobby out as a way to participate in the national archives is an end in itself.
But…computers can definitely do this way better, right?
I had the same thought but maybe on old hand writing they can't?
EDIT:
I tried giving the sample to 4o and it gave:
The following is the declaration of James Lambert, a soldier of the Revolutionary War in North America.
The said James Lambert this day personally appeared in the Probate Court of the County of Dearborn in the State of Indiana and at the November Term of said Court (1841), it being a court of record created by the laws of Indiana and made oath that:
On the 25th day of March 1842, he will be eighty-five years old, that he was born in the State of Maryland, that he is now a resident of said county and has been for the 27 years last past; that he has lived in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania...
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> This is all very cool so I’m not trying to be dismissive. In a lot of ways, giving a hobby out as a way to participate in the national archives is an end in itself.
> But…computers can definitely do this way better, right?
No.
Cursive writing is analog and fluid, lacking consistency across authors and often inconsistent by an individual author as well. When done well, it could be classified as its own art form. When done poorly, it can resemble the path walked by a chicken on meth.
iPad seems to do OK, but it has more to go by since it has the timing and pressure as well as the written text.
Current LLMs can absolutely do this as well as you can, probably better.
> Current LLMs can absolutely do this as well as you can, probably better.
This is obviously disprovable, in that if they could, they would, and this call to action would not exist.
That's quite a lot of faith you have in them.
Them being the National Archives? What about the National Archives makes you think they're particularly inept at utilizing LLMs?
I'm tired of this brand of dismissive cynicism.
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After using a keyboard for circa 50 years, I can't read my own handwriting. I can't even give a reproduceable signature.
Same here. Old enough to remember when your signature on a credit card receipt would be given a quick look to compare it to the scrawl on the back of the card. If this was still being done I’d probably fail 50% of the transactions I attempt.
Nobody has checked the back of my credit card for the presence of a signature in decades, let alone whether the signature matches. (I also haven't bothered to sign my credit card for this reason, but also because why would I want somebody to have my actual signature if my card is stolen?) These days my "signature" on a credit card purchase is usually a smiley face. Nobody has ever complained.
Yup, it’s been decades - I remember it happening with the carbon copy imprinting devices and it may have been more common in the US rural South where I was working at the time. The squiggles I fingerpaint on checkout screens now are my version of your smiley face.
Me too, and I used to be proud of my handwriting back in the 90's. Definitely a loss in self-expression.
Isn't this like a bread-and-butter AI task?
“The following is the declaration of James Lambert, a soldier of the Revolutionary War in North America.” “The said James Lambert, on this day personally appeared in the Probate Court of the County of Dearborn in the State of Indiana, at the November Term of said Court [1841], it being a court of record created by the laws of Indiana, and made oath that on the 25th day of March 1842 he will be eighty‐five years old; that he was born in the State of Maryland; that he is now a resident of [said] county and has been for the [27] years last past; that he has lived in Virginia, Maryland, [and Pennsylvania]; that…”
These kinds of problems, matching up cursive to actual text, would seem to play to the absolute best strengths of an LLM, given how much basic language structure the models encode.
> 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.
I've seen people do that, and the results are.. just sad. These modern models insert their twitter-era "what grabs attention must be true" view into the very little authentic past we still possess.
What did 4o get wrong about the title image in the transcription I just gave you?
Prompt:
You are a paleologist specializing in analysis of cursive handwriting; tell me what the following text says: (pasting the picture).
The following is the declaration of James Lambert, a soldier of the Revolutionary War in North America.
The said James Lambert this day personally appeared in the Probate Court of the County of Dearborn in the state of Indiana and at the November Term of said court (1841), it being a court for claims created by the laws of Indiana and makes oath that:
"On the 25th day of March 1842, he will be eighty-five years old; that he was born in the state of Maryland; that he is now a resident of said county and has been for the 27 years last past; that he has lived in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania ..."Might be in the training data:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
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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?
Someone with practice at reading old cursive would likely be able to read a sample such as this one at least at a pace suitable for reading aloud. An expert, of course, could do it as fast as if it were their "native" script.
Here is an example of a non-expert compared to an expert reading aloud [0].
I learned cursive in school in the early 2000s, but I could never read my grandmother's handwriting. Whenever she mailed me a card, I would have to have my mom read it to me.
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".
For me, the first sentence was almost immediately readable, I just had to slow down a bit to decipher the name
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!
I learned cursive in school (born in the 80s), and the first sample was indecipherable.
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.)
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.
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.
This reminded me of something the historian Megan Marshall wrote in the introduction to her book The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005):
“I became expert in deciphering the sisters’ handwriting, and that of their ancestors, parents, and friends. Each era and each correspondent presented different challenges. Some hands were sprawling, some spindly, some cramped; t’s went uncrossed at the ends of words, and f’s and s’s were interchanged; spelling, capitalization, and punctuation could be erratic or idiosyncratic. Often, to save paper and postage, the sisters turned a single sheet ninety degrees and wrote back across a page already covered with handwriting. I learned to be especially attentive to these cross-written lines, in which the sisters invariably confided their deepest feelings in the last hurried moments of closing a letter. Here I would find the urgent personal message that had been put off for the sake of dispensing news or settling business. In one such postscript, I discovered Elizabeth’s account of a conversation with Horace Mann in which the two spoke frankly of their love for each other and finally settled on what it meant.”
A photograph of a letter with cross-writing is here:
https://www.masshist.org/database/1774
Marshall wrote more in an article for Slate:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/05/reading-the-peab...
> and f’s and s’s were interchanged
Could these be instances of the long s, “ſ”, easily confused with an f?
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!
As someone with terrible handwriting but decent cursive, i think cursive provides a better structure for achieving cleaner penmanship compared to non-cursive writing. My theory is that cursive’s consistency of soft, flowing loops rather than a mix of abrupt angles and disconnected lines helps create a more uniform result.
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
Handwriting is a skill, you get better with practice!
A lot of bad handwriting stems from using it to write down things quickly (see: https://imgur.com/doctors-strike-5ANma ).
If you instead focus on doing slow calligraphy, your handwriting can improve rapidly.
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.
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
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Thanks for posting this collective effort.
Pretty easy to get started after signing up at login.gov
then https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/get-started-trans... with video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwQ5pEWWFY8
The support forum is https://historyhub.history.gov/citizen_archivists/ to ask questions
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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?
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.
It's definitely not faster to write. That's kind of the whole point. Also it's barely a "different" system. You just join the letters together. In the UK it's called "joined-up writing" and everyone learns it in primary school where there is plenty of time for learning.
It is definitely easier to read print though - for a lot of people's handwriting anyway. It's much easier to be lazy and just do an illegible scrawl with joined-up writing than print.
It varies a lot though; I had a PhD supervisor whose handwriting was illegible to everyone - even himself! My wife's handwriting on the other hand is practically a font.
Print is just so slow to write...
Studies have generally found little difference in writing speed between the two or a slight speed benefit of manuscript over cursive.
Mostly though, speed comes with practice. If you only write in cursive, you'll no doubt feel manuscript writing slow. I only use manuscript writing and find cursive painfully slow.
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.
>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.
Cursive probably made sense at a time when everyone was writing with quill pens.
They could be forgiven for writing in print, but I wonder how they will "sign" their signature, e.g. for legal documents. Sure, they could print that, too, but it would be a departure from the many generations before them that learned how to "properly" sign their name. Are they embarrassed that they don't know how to write their name as a traditional signature? Do they care at all?
I realize many legal documents are "signed" via keyboard, meaning you just need to type your name, but some things are still done via pen and paper.
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.
It's pretty country specific & not just US.
German school: You have to write cursive with fountain pen
South African uni: You're not allowed to write cursive, we can't read it
...sigh...just decide ffs
You do realize that you are posting on a thread whose OP thesis is that cursive is unreadable for most people.
Funnily 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.
I'm 28. I can only read the document in the article with a lot of effort and fiddling with the contrast.
The Australian War Memorial has a volunteer program for transcribing old letters and diaries and such: https://transcribe.awm.gov.au/
I gave it a go but it was too hard for me! I write in cursive but I found most of it illegible.
> 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
I agree that cursive handwriting has become useless.
As a child, even many years before having access to personal computers or any other kind of typewriting, I have switched my handwriting from cursive to using the kind of sans-serif typefaces used in technical drawing and since then I have never written again cursively, with the exception of my signature, where required on official documents.
Nevertheless, I believe that some kind of calligraphy is necessary for developing fine motor skills in children, unless it is replaced with some other activity that requires a similar precision in the movements of the fingers and of the hand.
They started teaching it again because it correlated with better outcomes for things seemingly unrelated to writing. And it was important to learn it before typing supposedly. There is probably some better way to accomplish whatever it is actually doing, but they don't seem to know that.
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Not that I can tell, unless you encounter a teacher who (personally) believes it’s worthwhile.
The real problem, IMO, is that they don’t teach cursive but also don’t teach typing. They’ve thrown laptops at the kids without giving them the basic skill necessary to be effective in that medium.
They stopped teaching cursive for a number of years but all the schools in my area start it around age 6 or 7 now. They start typing the next year with some horribly boring typing program.
I have a family heirloom civil war journal and much of it is unfortunately near undecipherable cursive writing.
It would be great if this would eventually develop into some kind of set of open models that would work on content like this.
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 mom and her cursive is not particularly neat or clean.
>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.
I’m not sure why cursive would be faster given the letterforms require a lot more travel.
Maybe it would be when writing with a quill where splatter and breakage were a concern, but surely not with a ballpoint pen.
Print/block letters. Random picture from the web: https://i.imgur.com/4X1Mz11.jpeg
I grew up in Portugal, so a different education system, and used cursive until I was 11 or 12. But I had terrible hand writing and one day during class I decided to write text like it was printed on books, computers, etc, and that's what I've been doing since then. Still looks bad, but at least it's readable :P
I guess that using block letters, also known as print writing. From Wikipedia: Elementary education in English-speaking countries typically introduces children to the literacy of handwriting using a method of block letters, which may later advance to cursive. The policy of teaching cursive in American elementary schools has varied over time, from strict endorsement, to removal, to being reinstated.
I learnt it here in Australia in my early school years, and hated it because it was both slower to write and more difficult to read. I switched back to standard writing as soon as I was allowed.
Unless it's really badly written, like mine is these days, I can read cursive quite comfortably. Guess it's a matter of habit.
I learned cursive in elementary school in the US. But I went to a private Islamic school
Those around me just write a lot more slowly, writing in print (they don’t connect the letters like in cursive, they can’t easily read my very-clean cursive either, which gives a feeling that my cursive is a sort of superpower)
I learned cursive in 2nd grade and was very strictly REQUIRED to use it up until high school, where they stopped requiring cursive.
1) My cursive was always slower than print. I was happy to go back to print so I could write fast. I went to school in the "analog" era, so 100% of all assignments were hand written and not typed.
2) I noticed that literally only 1 person in my school stayed with cursive when printing was an option. It was so unusual it stuck out.
3) I only know one person who writes cursive now in every day life even though 100% of us learned it in school.
4) That person is my dad and he writes in the style of these documents. If you gave me one of these documents and told me my dad wrote it, id believe you.
Which makes me think we all somehow were taught cursive wrong or practiced it wrong. My cursive was never fast and never looked like these documents.
Anyway, I found this, which summed up my feelings learning cursive perfectly
https://nautil.us/cursive-handwriting-and-other-education-my...
>Reading and literacy expert Randall Wallace, of Missouri State University, says “it seems odd and perhaps distracting that early readers, just getting used to decoding manuscript, would be asked to learn another writing style.”
I found it so frustrating that I just learned how to write one way and then they tell me that's not the "proper" way to write and we need to learn this other way to write.
Very interesting.. Frankly did not know most of what's said in replies.. That it's not compulsorily taught and more surprisingly it's slower to write!
I thought having to lift pen repeatedly would be slower? Anyway I need to try to really know I guess! Versus the time taken to add those extra links.
Like most others I've not written much in years perhaps decades, that has screwed up my handwriting as even minor notes are these days illegible even to me after a few days
Thanks for the replies.. Cleared a few misconceptions... One of them being writing in blocks is somewhat 'childish' and cursive is more literate.
Added later: read parts of the long article it's very interesting.. Need to read it fully.
>I thought having to lift pen repeatedly would be slower?
The extra strokes required for all those fucking loops more than make up for having to pick up the pen.
Cursive probably made a lot of sense when people were writing with quill pens, but in modern times each individual has their own comfort level and preferences.
>Cleared a few misconceptions... One of them being writing in blocks is somewhat 'childish' and cursive is more literate.
I was taught exactly that when I was growing up, which is why cursive was required for all school assignments pre high school. I always thought it was bullshit though because books aren't written in cursive and I only knew a single adult that used cursive in their every day lives. It seemed like a weird academic script.
I think a big reason I was so frustrated with being forced to use cursive in school was because after I learned to write in print and before I learned cursive I wrote a LOT. Like I'd write stories almost every day. I loved writing so much and then they gave me this new script that I needed to use for writing that slowed me down. It's like... Stop changing things on me.
I'm really glad cursive is no longer required in a lot of places. My school years would have been so much better without being forced to use cursive.
I'm not sure if it's related to how kids are taught to hold the pen. And the pen itself. In India as a kid, that was really long back, ball pens banned, you had to use fountain pens. And I hold the pen like it's featured in most pen ads.
When I spent time in East, like Singapore, Malaysia I was shocked to see people holding pens like they're about to stab the paper. Even kids. But I did learn they also had fountain pens only rule for a long while before relaxing.
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They should hire a bunch of teachers to do this over the summer! Every teacher I know is an expert at reading terrible handwriting.
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Americans... consider reading handwriting a superpower?
This explains a lot
My brother in history, I can't even read mine
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.
Why did people use to write like this?
It's faster than writing out individual letters.
How does one actually sign up?
From https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/register-and-get-...:
> Citizen Archivists must register for a free user account in order to contribute to the National Archives Catalog. Begin the registration process by clicking on the Log in / Sign Up button found in the upper right hand corner of the Catalog.
Catalog: https://catalog.archives.gov/
It might be nice for people to be able to actually read the documents in the National Archives rather than relying on a transcription or a mobile app.
I wonder if they've considered making a simple tutorial on how to read cursive? It's not that hard if you can already read printed English. And of course you can practice on documents in the National Archives.
It's exciting and fun to learn to read an unfamiliar script, like the runes on the cover of The Hobbit ... or the engraving-style cursive of the US Constitution.
I think it likely that reading the great variety of cursive styles makes simple teaching rather complicated. Folks who spent years in school reading and writing in cursive can quickly adapt to the various styles, in a way that I'm not sure it could be done in a simple tutorial.
> I wonder if they've considered making a simple tutorial on how to read cursive?
In generations past, this was called "elementary school."
i dont think the problem is the lack of resources to learn how to read and write cursive
Except that it does say that in the article, that’s it's a lack of education in reading cursive.
Those two statements aren't at odds with each other.
For example, there's a great abundance of resources to learn about music theory and such too, the average person doesn't know such things because they aren't interested.
no, it says the opposite, that there is growing interest in bringing it back into curriculums in various states. but that's aside from the point that the smithsonian making a tutorial on reading cursive would just represent an additional resource, of which we are not lacking, to learn. whether or not we teach it is different, but finding a resource to learn is not hard.
Maybe linking to the resource. "Learn how to read this document."
I find the article's conflation of two topics involving cursive writing ignorant or disingenuous to the point that I almost wanted to respond with my own comment on that itself. If you study cursive writing in class, you are likely to learn simple and standard letterforms like Palmer script.
But the task requested by the National Archives is more akin to paleography where you can expect each author or work to have their own (region-based/family-based) handwriting that requires decipherment, even for experts. You may have encountered a coworker or schoolmate's indecipherable chicken scratch print writing; that is what you should expect, only cursive.
I still write like that
I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can
OCR is VERY good
Actually I think in 2025 you are correct, we just haven’t got the best tech into the OCR software that’s out there in the real world. I just pasted the letter from the article into ChatGPT (4o) and asked “what does this old letter say?” The response:
—-
The following is the declaration of James Lambert, a soldier of the Revolutionary War in North America.
The said James Lambert on this day personally appeared in the Probate Court of the County of Dearborn in the State of Indiana and at the November Term of said Court (1841), it being a court of record established by the laws of Indiana and made oath that:
On the 25th day of March 1842 he will be eighty-five years old; that he was born in the State of Maryland; that he is now a resident of said county and has been for the 27 years last past; that he has lived in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania…
—-
I've been trying every state of the art OCR solution on my students' handwritten essays for fifteen years and have yet to find anything even close to acceptable.
I'm the founder of handwritingocr.com - have you checked out our free trial? We have loads of educators using our service for exactly this, and they seem quite happy with it.
What methods have you tried?
> 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 ...
> 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.
> 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 within the state of the art" is a sweeping generalization lacking understanding of the difficulties involved.
Go ahead and find something hard, and relate back the steps you took to find it.
> 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.
There are two claims. The main one is that all of these documents are easy to individually transcribe by machine. The other is that a whole lot can be OCR'd, which is pretty simple to check.
That's not a claim that processing the entire archive would be trivial. And even if it was, whether that would make someone the "hero they want" is part of what's being called into question.
So your silly demand going unmet proves nothing.
Also, "give me an example please" is not a strawman!
If you actually want to prove something, you need to show at least one document in the set that a human can do but not a machine, or to really make a good point you need to show that a non-neglibile fraction fit that description.
> So your silly demand going unmet proves nothing.
I made demands of no one.
> Also, "give me an example please" is not a strawman!
My identification of the strawman was that it referenced "find something hard" when I had said "be the hero they want" and that what is needed in this specific problem domain may be more difficult than what a generalization addresses.
> If you actually want to prove something, you need to show at least one document in the set that a human can do but not a machine, or to really make a good point you need to show that a non-neglibile fraction fit that description.
Maybe this is the proof you demand.
LLM's are statistical prediction algorithms. As such, they are nondeterministic and, therefore, provide no guarantees as to the correctness of their output.
The National Archives have specific artifacts requiring precise textual data extraction.
Use of nondeterministic tools known to produce provably incorrect results eliminate their applicability in this workflow due to all of their output requiring human review. This is an unnecessary step and can be eliminated by the human reading the original text themself.
Does that satisfy your demand?
> I made demands of no one.
Whatever you want to call "If it's that easy, then do it"
> LLM's [...] Does that satisfy your demand?
That's a different argument from the one above where you were trying to contradict tptacek. And that argument is flawed itself. In particular, humans don't have guarantees either.
> provably incorrect results
This gets back to the actual request from earlier, which is showing an example where the machine performs below some human standard. Just pointing out that LLMs make mistakes is not enough proof of incorrectness in this specific use case.
I did in fact do it, and what I got was much, much easier than the samples in the article, which 4o did fine with. I'm sorry, but I declare the burden of proof here to be switched. Can you find a hard one?
(I don't think you need to Wikipedia-cite "straw man" on HN).
> I did in fact do it, and what I got was much, much easier than the samples in the article, which 4o did fine with.
Awesome.
Can you guarantee its results are completely accurate every time, with every document, and need no human review?
> I'm sorry, but I declare the burden of proof here to be switched.
If you are referencing my stating:
If it's that easy, then do it and be the hero they want.
> Perhaps "random humans" can perform tasks which could reshape your belief:
>> OCR is VERY good
To which I again ask, can you guarantee the correctness of OCR results will exceed what "random humans" can generally provide? What about "non-random motivated humans"?
My point is that automated approaches to tasks such as what the National Archives have outlined here almost always require human review/approval, as accuracy is paramount.
> (I don't think you need to Wikipedia-cite "straw man" on HN).
I do so for two purposes. First, if I misuse a cited term someone here will quickly correct me. Second, there is always a probability of someone new here which is unaware of the cited term(s).
> If you are referencing my stating:
> > If it's that easy, then do it and be the hero they want.
> Then I don't really know how to respond.
If someone says a thing is easy, and you respond by demanding they do it a million times to prove that it's easy, you are the one that has screwed up the burden of proof.
Can I ask, did you sign up and look at what they're actually looking for? Show of good faith: can you give 3 of the headers for the top-level "missions" they have for transcriptions?
I have failed to express myself clearly and for that I apologize.
What I was trying to convey is that no matter what tooling is employed for this specific problem, a human will have to review the result to ensure accuracy. Since the problem is defined as reading cursive handwriting, people who can do so intrinsically obviate the need for tooling.
Whether or not automation can produce reasonable results is moot when the requirement is to have as accurate as possible a one-time transcription of cursive handwriting documents.
Please don't link to wikipedia definitions of elementary terms. It's condescending and obnoxious.
> Please don't link to wikipedia definitions of elementary terms. It's condescending and obnoxious.
I respect what you have chosen to contribute to this conversation, but neither need nor seek your approval of mine.
For the record, it mostly comes across as you only recently learning what a straw man argument is, which, in the context of a message board argument, is a rough thing to have to admit, so you have my sympathies.
Also, you seem to have taken issue with the phrase “random humans” because you’re confused at what’s being done here. It is random humans. Non experts.
Experts are asking for the help of non experts.
> Anyone with an internet connection can volunteer to transcribe historical documents and help make the archives’ digital catalog more accessible
> Also, you seem to have taken issue with the phrase “random humans” because you’re confused at what’s being done here. It is random humans. Non experts.
I'm largely aligned with your interpretation of "random humans", with a clarification below. The experts I was referencing are the ones you identified:
> Experts are asking for the help of non experts.
The call to action by the archivists (experts), IMHO, has the intent to engage people with interest in the topic. So not really random from a mathematical definition, but perhaps better thought of as "unknown interested parties."
Granted, this is my unsubstantiated opinion.
There are conceivable reasons why they may be telling a half truth here. Just engaging the public is a worthy goal here.
> There are conceivable reasons why they may be telling a half truth here. Just engaging the public is a worthy goal here.
Asserting an ulterior motive without supporting proof is to engage in conspiracy theories.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.[0]
The alternative is me saying that appealing to their “expertise” is an appeal to authority fallacy that flies in the face of general evidence that modern OCR is far better than humans at character recognition. Especially random non specialized humans.
Fair point.
It doesn't look like a cigar (very tricky documents) though. Hence the skepticism.
> I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can
I do.
> OCR is VERY good
Uh, my experience is extremely different.
I would challenge you to find a picture of text that you think a human can read and OCR cannot. I’m happy to demonstrate. The text shown in this article is trivial.
The archivists themselves say that they run into such texts often enough that this program was needed:
> 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.
They are absolutely aware of the advances in these tools, so if they say they're not completely there yet I believe them. One likely reason is that the models probably have less 1800s-era cursive in their training set than they do modern cursive.
It's likely that with more human-tagged data they could improve on the state of the art for OCR, but it's pretty arrogant to doubt the agency in charge of this sort of thing when they say the tech isn't there yet.
Can someone please post a sample of one of these images that can only be read by a human for us naive OCR believers to see?
To be fair there was a similar discussion a few days ago in which an SME remained unconvinced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42566391
I don't necessarily agree with her conclusion because she wasn't participating directly in the thread and wasn't completely responsive to some of the points raised, but still, it appears that there are a few instances of difficult-to-read handwriting where OCR is still coming in second to skilled human interpretation.
That’s comprehension of English not reading characters
I've posted these above, but I'll give you your own copy because the bits are free. Does your OCR work on these? Mine sadly doesn't. But if yours does, then I'll switch to it.
The problem statement was text that random humans can read and OCR cannot.
If you want to provide a good faith answer at least make it English. I assume this is French but it’s obviously much harder to evaluate on both ends when you’re mixing up the language.
I'm confused.
Which parts of "OCR" and "human" stand for "modern english"?
Are you suggesting that humans can't read or write in french? Because I can point to a lot of them who would disagree.
Then please provide a single example that we can’t instantly solve. Happy to prove them wrong.
> 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?
Text that is _intentionally constructed_ to fool computers but not humans is obviously out of scope. But they’re generally easily solved with OCR these days anyway.
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.
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.
Yeah ok, but it might take me a few tries because I don't know what you're using. I hope that's agreeable?
What does your OCR say that these say? The first one isn't too hard for a human (assuming appropriate language skill). The second one is a bit more difficult.
Your experience is obsolete.
Oh, ok then.
I mean, all you have to do is feed the image to ChatGPT, and it will read it basically as well as you can.
Denying/downvoting reality is always an option, of course.
Can you feed these to ChatGPT and tell me what it says they say?
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 I have a feeling it is, it's a more credible (not to mention creative) attempt than most non-specialists would come up with.
o1-pro, on the other hand, completely shat the bed: https://i.imgur.com/mivdjkA.png I haven't seen it fail like that in a LONG time, so good job, I guess. :) I resubmitted it by uploading the .jpg directly, and it mumbled something about a "Problem generating the response."
Second image:
Gemini 2.0 seemed to have more trouble with this one: https://i.imgur.com/oEktMP6.png
o1-pro gave another error message, but 4o did pretty well from what I can tell (agree/disagree?): https://i.imgur.com/7iR1y7U.png I thought it was interesting that it got the date wrong, as '1682' is pretty easy to make out compared to much of the text.
In summary, I think you broke o1-pro.
> 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?
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.
> I can't agree that this type of content is relevant when discussing straightforward OCR tasks on modern languages.
1682 is a number though, language independent, and you noted it as being extremely obvious to a human, even one who can't read any of the other language. So I do think the tools are useful, but people probably still need to be there for now until better models for this are made that stop getting especially obvious parts wrong.
Comment was deleted :(
Not being rude was also an option, one you chose not to take for some reason. Seriously, all it would've taken was for you to say something like "there have been a lot of advancements so it's probably different than you remember". This conversation would've gone much smoother for you if you had.
And BugsJustFindMe can't downvote you, because it was a reply to him. So don't bite his head off over it. You got downvoted because you were a jerk, plain and simple.
Not being rude was also an option
Refraining from reflexively pooh-poohing AI with uninformed and/or out-of-date opinions is also an option, but not one often exercised on HN.
It gets old not being able to carry on a discussion without squinting at grayed-out text, simply because someone pointed out that humans aren't robots and should no longer have to emulate them.
This is cool.
can this be mechanically turked?
I can even write cursive. Take that, Zoomers.
[flagged]
It says "The following is the dedication of James Lambert a soldier of the Revolutionary wars with the Americas."
blah blah blah
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
oh, it is "declaration", yes, but not South America. this guy is even on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/James-Lambert-1758-1847-Elaboration-R...
I got “North America”
Hmm, interesting: “North America” does make sense, and 4o also seems to transcribe it that way, but the handwriting looks like it says “South America” to me.
Yes, that seems right. Not that difficult. This one suffers from some poor penmanship, though.
Why do they need volonteers to manually do it? Open AI models like Microsoft's TrOCR are very effective for handwritten English
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code