Reading Cursive for the Archives.

Elizabeth Weise at USA Today writes about a worthy cause (archived):

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. […] 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.”

So there you are; if you have the increasingly rare skill required (insert rant here) as well as the time and temperament, go for it. (Thanks, Nick!)

And speaking of archives, check out Preservation of Osor’s rare book collection through digitisation (EAP1517):

The target material is the surviving private collection of uniquely rare books in the traditional Mongolian script held by Mr. Bat-Ochir Osor, who was one of the nation’s prominent educators and Mongolian language promoters of mid 20th century modern Mongolia.

His collection comprises exceptionally rare books printed in the traditional Mongolian script in the 1920s through to the 1940s, before Mongolia was forcefully shifted to Russian Cyrillic in the 1940s.

Thanks, Trevor!

Comments

  1. “Increasingly rare” seems like an odd description for something that likely over half the population still uses on a regular basis, especially as the sample in the USA Today article seemed fairly straightforward.
    When I was in school, reading texts from Elizabethan England, it took some time to get used to the shorthand, but generally decoding was possible if one understood the context.
    So maybe they should be searching for “increasingly rare” people who understand American history.

  2. “Increasingly rare” seems like an odd description for something that likely over half the population still uses on a regular basis

    On what are you basing that? Young people certainly don’t use it, and even a lot of older people seem to have drifted away from it. I haven’t seen any recent stats, but “over half” sounds unlikely.

  3. Does “increasingly rare” imply “rare”? Not to me, but I skew mathematical–logical on such questions of nuance.

  4. Cursive was removed from the core curriculum around 2010, and since then, many states have reinstated it.
    So just look at the proportion of the population that was educated since 2010 for a good indication of who might not have been exposed to cursive handwriting.
    That basically means gen z, maybe a quarter of the population.

    The real challenge is figuring out context and the shorthand employed in that context.

  5. Christopher Culver says

    I still write with a pen a great deal, but I have noticed that the quality of my cursive penmanship has declined, presumably out of a subconscious realization that no one but me is ever going to read what I write. Writing for other people is now always done via a computer or phone keyboard.

  6. J.W. Brewer says

    It has been some decades since I have actually employed the cursive I was taught in elementary school and now I’m grumpy I wasn’t instead taught to write in traditional Mongolic script or at least Phagspa. Although I guess I was taught hiragana and 99.99%+ of my cohort of Americans weren’t. I think my hiragana is now even rustier than my cursive, though.

  7. likely over half the population still uses on a regular basis, …

    To echo the above comments, I was always rubbish at cursive. I often can’t read even my own cursive. I abandoned it at the earliest opportunity. If I write with a pen — usually only for official forms and shopping lists — it’s printed.

    Reading (cursive) texts from Elizabethan England? at school? seems … bizarre. What gets in the way of understanding American (or any) history by reading transcriptions? I would have thought to the contrary: being forced to pore over original documents would rapidly make you resent learning any history at all.

    I do notice the yoof hold their pen in a singularly awkward fist-like grip. (And risk smudging their writing because they’re not arching over the paper from the wrist — certainly wouldn’t work with actual wet ink.) Is this the result of never being taught to hand-write at all?

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