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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 Watson's company, Transcription Services, has a rare specialty -- transcribing historical documents that stump average readers.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.
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
I would assume it's on /. because it's interesting "stuff that matters"....
Stephan
to be devoured by some ancient evil or long dead civilization.
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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.
There are two handwriting styles in German that are pretty much illegible to modern readers. Sütterlin was taught in the '30s and '40s to people who are alive today, but in 20 years, very few people will be able to read it. I can kinda-sorta read it because my grandmother (b. 1898) wrote letters in it, and my father's (b. 1930) handwriting was this weird combination of Sütterlin and American-style Palmer. Kurrent is even older and was taught to German school children up through the early 20th century. Kurrent's letter forms are however closer to Roman-style alphabet than Sütterlin.
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.
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.
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 lightly trained people in it, but a dearth of funding to keep people employed to get the 20 years of hands-on skills for the most delicate knowledge. And a lot of it hard-won, hard-learned skills from working with hundreds or thousands of less valuable documents over a career, and the senior people refuse to die off. There's going to be a massive purge as they hit forced retirement ages, because they haven't been able to train newer experts. There's been no funding to keep them on staff. If you value books as artistic objects in their own right, as I do, it's enough to make you weep.