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Where Old, Unreadable Documents Go to Be Understood (atlasobscura.com)
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 Watson's company, Transcription Services, has a rare specialty -- transcribing historical documents that stump average readers.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.
The reCAPTCHA 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 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.)
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
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
MIT and Georgia Tech develop technology to read books without opening them
Scientists Read Ancient Hebrew Scroll Without Opening It
Scanning an Ancient Biblical Text That Humans Fear to Open
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.