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?
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 The agency uses artificial intelligence and a technology known as optical character recognition to extract text from historical documents.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?
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.
> 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.
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".
[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!"
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.
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.
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.)
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 :)
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.
(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
I'm not native english speaker, but even I can read where it is wrong.
I'll leave it to be an excercise for the reader to find out mistakes, but it is
certainly not a Teapot trial.
Somehow GPT-4o performs better on this example and fails only on "New Mexican
practise" part.
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?
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...
> 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.
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:
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
“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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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...
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]
1: https://highshrink.com/2018/01/02/criss-cross-letters/
1 reply →
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.
1 reply →
> 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.
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!"
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.
Still, the fact that they’re combining AI and human effort makes sense
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42746490
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 love the idea of "synchronizing" with someone’s handwriting
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 :)
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`:
I'm not native english speaker, but even I can read where it is wrong. I'll leave it to be an excercise for the reader to find out mistakes, but it is certainly not a Teapot trial.
Somehow GPT-4o performs better on this example and fails only on "New Mexican practise" part.
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.
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?
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...
> 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.
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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...
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
Widespread literacy is an extremely recent phenomenon.
I highly doubt most people could write that well
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.
After using a keyboard for circa 50 years, I can't read my own handwriting. I can't even give a reproduceable signature.
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?
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.
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 28. I can only read the document in the article with a lot of effort and fiddling with the contrast.
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.
> particularly for Americans who never learned cursive in school.
American schools don’t teach it anymore?!
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.
Why would they? It’s an anachronism optimizing for writing speed
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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My brother in history, I can't even read mine
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.
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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.
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:
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.
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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
There are conceivable reasons why they may be telling a half truth here. Just engaging the public is a worthy goal here.
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> 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.
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Your experience is obsolete.
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Why do they need volonteers to manually do it? Open AI models like Microsoft's TrOCR are very effective for handwritten English
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”
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Yes, that seems right. Not that difficult. This one suffers from some poor penmanship, though.