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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writes "Researchers at the University of Massachusetts have created a tool for automatically searching handwritten historical documents, such as the 140,000 pages that make up George Washington's personal papers in the Library of Congress.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."
I hate reading/producing anything longer than a post-it note that's in handwriting.
The owls are not what they seem
Cursive writing certainly is. I can barely even read it anymore, much less write it. Does anybody else who is under 30 still write in cursive, other than when they made you do it in elementary school?
I took a lot of notes in College. I took a lot more notes in graduate school. I've even taken notes on books I've read for the fun of it. If I could run all of these through my scanner & search them from an application on my desktop, I could be really obnoxious in an argument.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
It's an interesting approach that should be extended to other languages than English. Most of the world's history is not about the US and it has certainly not been written down in English. What I would really like to have is a similar tool that can search, say, Greek, or Latin, (or whatever) handwritten text. Imagine being able to query Ovid for an item of interest without having to consult everything he's written. I can imagine that this might encourage people to study the classics (a pet peeve of mine is that many people lack historical sense...) and it would certainly facilitate research in this area.
If you can put the queries in English, with the search engine taking care of translation, it would be even better. Then, extended historical study comes within everyone's reach and the classical studies (or humaniora) might be transformed.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Yes, and I use it to record notes in my lab book I use at work. I record all sorts of things I discover there. Some entries are several pages long with charts and graphs and tables and diagrams. Try doing that in a few minutes in Word or OpenOffice.
The best part is I don't have to worry about backing up my lab books. The only real threat is fire, and it is no more dangerous than it is to CDs or hard drives.
While the cursive handwriting of the 1700's and early 1800's may seem curious to us (notably, the tall 's' that looks like an 'f'), it is a very easy style that is neat, legible, and painless. Notice how there are very few back strokes.
For those who are wondering, cursive is what you use when you get sick of trying to write in print legibly and quickly without getting carpal tunnel. Every culture has it. It's unfortunate it isn't common knowledge anymore in the US. Handwriting is a wonderful skill. It used to be people would judge others based on their handwriting skills in addition to their oratory.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Somebody invented a way for computers to recognize handwriting. Like, so 10 years ago.
I worked on an OCR system about 20 years ago. No pre-defined bitmaps of text, you trained the system on the font to be recognized. After a few hours you could turn it loose and it did fairly well. While goofing off we tried handwritten text. With good penmanship it worked to a degree.
Although it is hard to OCR text and very hard to OCR cursive text written in historical documents, performing searches on those documents does not require a complete comprehension of the textand is therefore much easier to do.
For instance, the software may be unable to distinguish the word bug from dog in one person's handwriting, but can still mark it with probabilities of the word's possible meanings.
If a person later searches for the word bug or dog at a future date along with other terms, a mathematical calculation can be done for the likelyhood of the match and the searcher can make his/her own judgement to the meaning of the text.
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Conrad Barski