Where Old, Unreadable Documents Go to Be Understood (atlasobscura.com) 44
From a report: On any given day, from her home on the Isle of Man, Linda Watson might be reading a handwritten letter from one Confederate soldier to another, or a list of convicts transported to Australia. Or perhaps she is reading a will, a brief from a long-forgotten legal case, an original Jane Austen manuscript. Whatever is in them, these documents made their way to her because they have one thing in common: They're close to impossible to read. Watson's company, Transcription Services, has a rare specialty -- transcribing historical documents that stump average readers. Once, while talking to a client, she found the perfect way to sum up her skills.
[...] Since she first started specializing in old documents, Watson has expanded beyond things written in English. She now has a stable of collaborators who can tackle manuscripts in Latin, German, Spanish, and more. She can only remember two instances that left her and her colleagues stumped. One was a Tibetan manuscript, and she couldn't find anyone who knew the alphabet. The other was in such bad shape that she had to admit defeat. In the business of reading old documents, Watson has few competitors. There is one transcription company on the other side of the world, in Australia, that offers a similar service. Libraries and archives, when they have a giant batch of handwritten documents to deal with, might recruit volunteers.
[...] Since she first started specializing in old documents, Watson has expanded beyond things written in English. She now has a stable of collaborators who can tackle manuscripts in Latin, German, Spanish, and more. She can only remember two instances that left her and her colleagues stumped. One was a Tibetan manuscript, and she couldn't find anyone who knew the alphabet. The other was in such bad shape that she had to admit defeat. In the business of reading old documents, Watson has few competitors. There is one transcription company on the other side of the world, in Australia, that offers a similar service. Libraries and archives, when they have a giant batch of handwritten documents to deal with, might recruit volunteers.
Re:AI FTW? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, and the answer to "Who's a convict in Australia?" is "All of them"
Re: AI FTW? (Score:4, Funny)
Like I give a fuck about some shopping list for a dude two thousand years ago
Some 2,000-year old documents can still be informative reading, e.g. the System 7 Unix source code.
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Re:AI FTW? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have noticed a lot of tech/computer nerds have a significant interest in language nerdery. I've seen /. threads devolve into arguments over correct Latin grammar. This certainly piques the interest of people who have a bit of language nerd in them, because it's as much about knowledge of old writing systems and abbreviations as it is ability to look at squiggly lines and pattern-match.
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I have noticed a lot of tech/computer nerds have a significant interest in language nerdery. I've seen /. threads devolve into arguments over correct Latin grammar. This certainly piques the interest of people who have a bit of language nerd in them, because it's as much about knowledge of old writing systems and abbreviations as it is ability to look at squiggly lines and pattern-match.
I wouldn't say so, but nerds do tend to be grammar nazis at least up until the point in their lives that they stop caring about what others think (usually mid 30's, about the same time you unashamedly start listening to the greatest hits of the 60's, 70's and 80's in your car). However we have nothing on the kind of pendants that come from old universities like Cambridge and Oxford. If you would like to see a truly vicious argument over a minor point of Latin grammar computer nerds with an interest in langu
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Re:AI FTW? (Score:4, Interesting)
My first thought on seeing the headline was about using technology to read ancient manuscripts which may be too fragile to open or may have even been written on recycled even older manuscripts. They use x-rays and computer imaging to read that which cannot be read by the human eye.
I've seen a few stories about this over the years.
Scientists read ancient sealed documents without opening them [usatoday.com]
MIT and Georgia Tech develop technology to read books without opening them [salon.com]
Scientists Read Ancient Hebrew Scroll Without Opening It [popularmechanics.com]
Scanning an Ancient Biblical Text That Humans Fear to Open [nytimes.com]
There's lots more out there and note those aren't just 4 different links to the same story.
But this story is still interesting to me too. I'm sure that the people doing the work in the linked article might be tasked with transcribing or translating the images of pages they can't actually touch.
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There's also a lot of practiced physical craft. My wife studied at West Dean College in England, a college dedicated to historical preservation and reconstruction. It includes clock making, tapestry weaving, ceramics, books, and metals conservation. The building is *littered* with amazing historical artifacts, with a wall of ancient weapons that made me drool on the carpet, whimpering "want to play!!!" with some of the lovingly restored specimens.
Sadly, the craft is rapidly disappearing. There's a glut of l
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The X-Ray stuff is cool. Multi-spectral photography is also great for stuff damaged by fire. But give me a high-quality digital photo and a Curves tool, and I'll show you things you normally wouldn't see.
The big problem is not fragility. Parchment, the treated animal skins that make up the pages of almost all European mss between the sixth and thirteenth centuries (and most books from the fourteenth), is so durable that, when people could no longer make sense of the handwriting style, they took the pages an
Re: AI FTW? (Score:1)
The last paragraph of the article.
I can't decide whether AI would be an improvement on the Slashdot editors or if it's already replaced them.
"Once, while talking to a client, she found the perfect way to
can't beat my doctor (Score:5, Funny)
I'd want to see this lady decipher the scribbling of a doctor I visited with foot pain recently. There's the Voynich Manuscript, then there's this.
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If they can't understand it 100%, they simply contact the doctor who prescribed it.
Getting a prescription wrong can kill someone.
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Which is exactly why we should switch from handwritten medical records to online data. Let it give the privacy paranoids fits if they want, but I would rather take the chance on al Qaeda reading the results of my colonoscopy over being killed by an error in a handwritten prescription. And I want that record to contain all medical data that has been accumulated about me.
But for some reason the medical profession wants to keep their goddamn handwritten files.Perhaps they think it will stave off the threat of
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I don't remember the last time I saw a handwritten prescription.
Every doctor I've been to in recent memory prints it out and signs it.
The rort is the fax fe pharmacies charge. Like it costs them more for you to have your doctor fax the prescription, so they can fill it at their leisure. Instead they charge more for faxing than to have you turn up at the pharmacy and wait for them to do it.
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Depends on the doctor, it seems. Some have a prescription pad and use it (and honestly, I've been able to read what it says - it's a quarter-letter sheet, the doctor's name is preprinted, so there's a lot of space for the doctor to write in very big block letters the prescription. We're talking inch-high block printing (I haven't seen cursive in a long time).
My other prescrip
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I don't remember the last time I saw a handwritten prescription.
We have a perfectly good standard for digital prescriptions, but most doctors here think that handwriting over fax is the latest tech they wish to use.
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Isn't Google's reCAPTCHA in this game? (Score:5, Interesting)
The reCAPTCHA [wikipedia.org] service does two things. Verifying a user is a human by offering something that's really hard to automate is the one everybody knows about. The other is an effort to crowdsource understanding of images. This started with decoding the words in scanned books that OCR [wikipedia.org] was having difficulty with.
There's your competition (though it's admittedly restricted to modern texts, so historical context and historical characters are beyond its scope ... and reCAPTCHA has recently moved on to other forms of image recognition.)
You call that "unreadable"? (Score:1)
Try reading some "intellectual property" in the future!
Hidden away in some corporate basement. Encrypted, with the key servers shut down long ago...
Researchers complain that we already have the second dark ages[1], starting with the invention of "copyright"[2].
THIS is unreadable. [pinimg.com]
There was a time, where Germany started to be called "the land of poets and thinkers". It was the time when Germany didn't have such laws but the UK already had. Art thrived and flourished in Germany, and starved in the UK.[3]
(Let's
This is just asking (Score:4, Funny)
Re: This is just asking (Score:1)
"Nearly there, it appears to be a prayer, no, more like a summoning. Just can't recognize this group of syllables which appears all over the manuscript. Ah, now I see! It's a name, Cthulhu, mighty Cthulhu."
All done. Now, what does it sound like? ...".
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
I'm guessing ... (Score:2)
Where Old, Unreadable Documents Go to Be Understood
Wingdings (Score:1)
For MS Works files, just use Libre Office. Heaven knows Microsoft Office is too incompetently made to handle them.
Try interpreting government legislation... (Score:2)
Not because you cannot read the actual words, more because you cannot understand their meaning.
Same with most government documents from just about any government.
Some handwriting styles have become illegible (Score:5, Informative)
Great! (Score:2)
Now all we need is someone to decipher Word documents we wrote 2 weeks ago but no longer render properly.
This is why I quit writing in cursive (Score:2)
Cursive saved time at the write stage (easier to write), at the cost of additional time at the read stage (harder to read). Since the write operation happened only once while the read operation could happen multiple times, I decided saving time at the write stage was not usually not worth it - the cumulative extra
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As a kid I never got the hang of it, writing cursive. I found it much easier, and thus faster, to write 'print' letters.
Reading cursive, even when neatly written take great effort, sloppy written cursive could as well be Elvish and is completely unreadable.
Some notes of letters I get I can't even recognise enough of it as letters or words to even understand what the subject is and then my wife pick's up, and she starts to make fun of me and starts reading it without effort.