The National Archives is looking for a volunteers to transcribe and classify old documents -- but but it helps if they can read cursive handwriting, reports Elizabeth Weise for USA Today.
“Reading cursive is a superpower,” said Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C.
More than 5,000 Citizen Archivists, ranging from students to retirees are helping digitize and catalog more than 300 million documents, ranging from "Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census," Weise reports. Also in need of cataloging are U.S. submarine patrol reports from 1941 to 1945
Anyone can give it a go, but reading older documents can be challenging.
Many young people never learned to write or read cursive handwriting in school, notes Weise. It went out of fashion in "the 1990s when many people shifted to email and then in the 2000s to texting." By 2010, Common Core standards urges schools to teach keyboarding, but not handwriting.
There's been a pushback, writes Weise. Now, "at least 14 states require that cursive handwriting be taught. California added a requirement in 2023, in part so students could read historic documents.
But many students don't write by hand or even type, says Jaime Cantrell, a professor of English at Texas A&M University - Texarkana. They use talk-to-text technology or AI. “I know that because there’s no punctuation, it reads like a stream of consciousness.”
AI can read handwritten documents, but often makes mistakes that need to be corrected by a human being.
Funny that this should pop up now. A friend who collects antique sewing machines and has quite a collection going back to the 1850s (the sewing machine was only invented in the early 1850s, btw), just bought 25 pounds of old letters between customers and various Singer offices. He is scanning them and I recently suggested that we could set up a system where people could volunteer to transcribe since they are all in cursive. He is figuring out a system to make that happen.
I guess I'm old now, I can read ancient cursive texts :D. But really, it seems like AI should be able to do this more efficiently
So I recently started doing this and I seriously love it! My first letter was from the 1700’s from a general and I found myself submerged by reading his letters. Very sad yet interesting.
I still write cursive on a regular basis so I found this very easy to read though some of the writing can be hard to understand.
It’s not paid but if I can help with a few transcriptions then I will.
Reading cursive AND doing arithmetic in my head? With superpowers like that, I should join the Avengers!