The National Archives is looking for volunteers, so if you can read this particular style of handwriting, you might want to give them a call.
The organization urgently needs to transcribe more than 200 years’ worth of US papers, but even while it would seem like a simple task—especially in an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is doing more and more of the effort for us—it’s not that easy.
Since many of the documents are from the 1700s, they were written in cursive, a writing style that only a select few can master. Even AI isn’t very good at it yet.
“Reading cursive is a superpower,” Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, DC, told USA Today.
History unlocked
Understanding the documents in the team’s database and regaining access to lost parts of history, such as Revolutionary War pension records, old Census records, immigration records, and even field notes from British astronomer Charles Mason, depend on the steadily declining expertise.
Although Suzanne hopes to add more, her team now has about 5,000 Citizen Archivists who assist the Archive in interpreting and transcribing the millions of items in its catalog.
“There’s no application,” she explained. “You just pick a record that hasn’t been done and read the instructions. It’s easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.”
Reading cursive: a dying skill
In the past, children were taught the skill and even evaluated on it. However, handwriting became less significant as typewriters and then computers, the state-of-the-art technology of the time, arose.
Actually, by 2010, keyboard skills were the focus of regulators on the other side of the pond, and cursive is now a disappearing ability.
Even though it’s still taught in some schools, very few people utilize it outside of the classroom, and we all know how easily abilities that we don’t practice can elude us.
When was the last time you truly had to put anything in writing, just to be fair? I even used the internet to sign my lease.
AI to the rescue? Not so fast
Naturally, you might think that AI can learn to fill in the gaps, but that might not be the case for some time.
Although AI has begun to read certain cursive, human input is still needed for the final edit.
“There’s usually some mistakes,” Nancy Sullivan from The National Archives admitted. “So we call it ‘extracted text’ and our volunteers have to look it over and compare it to the original.”
This implies that a volunteer’s review is required before the document is deemed officially transcribed. Furthermore, due to their age, some of the documents are dog-eared, damaged, or smudged, and AI may find it difficult to decipher them all.
Have we finally found something that AI can’t do?!
In any case, you can volunteer here if you believe you have the “superpower” to assist these folks. Additionally, the company claims that you can learn cursive on the job even if you are not currently able to read it.
“It helps – but it’s not necessary,” Suzanne says.
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