Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Reading Cursive is Now a ‘superpower’: National Archives Seeks Help to Transcribe 300 Million Documents; Can You Read Cursive? It's a Superpower the National Archives is Looking For

Reading cursive is now a ‘superpower’: National Archives seeks help to transcribe 300 million documents:
The National Archives is seeking volunteers who can read cursive to help transcribe more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog, saying the skill is a “superpower.”
The penmanship style has become almost obsolete as typing and texting take over.
Most American schools no longer teach the handwriting form, instead focusing on keyboard skills.
Currently, 24 states require cursive to be taught — but that alone may not help with the National Archives task at hand.
“It’s not just a matter of whether you learned cursive in school, it’s how much you use cursive today,” Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, DC, told USA Today.
“We create missions where we ask volunteers to help us transcribe or tag records in our catalog,” Isaacs explained, saying there are more than 200 years worth of documents to get through.
The organization has registered over 5,000 citizen archivists but could still use more help.
“There’s no application,” Isaacs said. “You just pick a record that hasn’t been done and read the instructions. It’s easy to do for a half-hour a day or a week.” --->READ MORE HERE
Mike Blake/Reuters
Can you read cursive? It's a superpower the National Archives is looking for:
If you can read cursive, the National Archives would like a word.
Or a few million. More than 200 years worth of U.S. documents need transcribing (or at least classifying) and the vast majority from the Revolutionary War era are handwritten in cursive – requiring people who know the flowing, looped form of penmanship.
“Reading cursive is a superpower,” said Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C.
She is part of the team that coordinates the more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists helping the Archive read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog. And they're looking for volunteers with an increasingly rare skill.
Those records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census.
“We create missions where we ask volunteers to help us transcribe or tag records in our catalog,” Isaacs said.
To volunteer, all that’s required is to sign up online and then launch in. “There's no application,” she said. “You just pick a record that hasn't been done and read the instructions. It's easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.”
Being able to read the longhand script is a huge help because so many of the documents are written using it.
“It’s not just a matter of whether you learned cursive in school, it’s how much you use cursive today,” she said.
Cursive has fallen out of use
American’s skill with this connected form of script has been slowly waning for decades.
Schoolchildren were once taught impeccable copperplate handwriting and penmanship was something they were graded on.
That began to change when typewriters first came into common use in the business world in the 1890s and was further supplanted in the 1980s by computers. --->READ MORE HERE
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