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| An OCR reader -- with printed text, mind you |
From Ottawa, Frank Rockland shares some thoughts on whether Optical Character Recognition can or will help with transcribing -- or simply understanding -- handwritten historical documents.
I went looking for a tool that could help convert handwriting into text for note taking.
I found this discussion on Reddit, From the computervision community on Reddit: 2024 review of OCR tools extracting text from handwritten forms and documents which seems to provide a comprehensive list of the latest attempts at Handwriting OCR. I’ve tried Google Notes which has some Handwriting OCR capability, but it wasn’t very good on some of the documents I tested.
Learning to read the handwriting of French mrechants, officials, clerks, and notaries when researching New France history was a life-changing experience for me. The idea that you might just set a piece of software to do it for you is hard to fathom at first encounter.
But there's Google Translate, there's Otter transcription, there's so many other digital wonders, that one hesitates to doubt.... Anyone have any experience with OCR'ing the 18th century?
