Search Engines for Handwritten Documents

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Massachusetts have created a tool for automatically searching handwritten historical documents, such as the 140,000 pages that make up George Washington's personal papers in the Library of Congress. The most interesting part is that the papers are scanned versions of the originals and the search tool actually recognizes the handwritten text from these images."

Comments

Re:Who still *writes* those? Well, after college?

[Tackhead]

> In America, handwriting is only for old people.

And college students during exam season. (Can't speak for the Koreans.)

Blue-stained hands-up, all those who remember those glorious essay exams from the mandatory humanities courses, where your grade ceases to be based on the merits of your ideas (and/or your ability to parrot your professor's ideas), but is solely a function of how well-developed the muscles in your right hand are, in order to keep scribbling for the entire three hours what would have taken you 90 minutes to type.

Of course, even in the dark days before I discovered Slashdot, my CS education had proven to be more than ample preparation for the worst that any Philosophy, History, or (worst of all) English prof could throw at me. *rimshot*

So, when does henscratch.google.com (searchable handwritten blogs) come out?