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Crowdsourcing Helps to Unlock the Mystery of Cursive

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This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Manuscript Division, and Victoria Van Hyning, a senior innovation specialist in the division. This post coincides with National Handwriting Day.

Washington, D.C., students learn to read cursive at a Nov. 19 event at the Library celebrating the 155th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address and a new crowdsourcing initiative for transcribing historical documents. Photo by Shawn Miller.

“That’s so beautiful, but what does it say?” This is what we often hear from visitors to the Library of Congress when they see letters and other documents written by hand. This phenomenon — the inability of so many people to read handwriting — is the byproduct of a moment of technological change that is every bit as significant as the one that began with the introduction of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the middle of the 15th century. The digital age has transformed us from people who read and write by hand to people who type and read on a screen, from letter-writers to emailers, texters and tweeters.

This change is so recent that our population now includes a mixture of people born before the digital age, who learned the techniques and conventions of handwriting and letter writing, and younger people, who grew up online. While older people have had to learn the ways of the digital age, younger people know less and less about the ways of the analog world, even when its language and symbols persist into the digital — “cc,” for example, which appears inklessly atop every email message, recalls the inky blue sheets of carbon paper typists rolled into their typewriters to make copies.

Why does it matter? This isn’t just a question of nostalgia, of regret for the old ways, such as the lost art of cursive, which few children now learn in school. It matters because when people are unable to read old documents, they lose the ability to make personal contact with the past.

Some very old documents necessarily require interpretation by experts. For example, the Library’s collection of cuneiform tablets, written by the Sumerians on clay more than 4,000 years ago. Or the leather-bound volume of town records, in Spanish, from 16th-century Peru in the Library’s Harkness Collection. Or the 17th-century manuscript law books, in Shakespeare’s English, collected by Thomas Jefferson.

This is from an outline of a speech Alexander Hamilton gave at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Note where he uses the long “s,” as in “Importance of the occafion.” Can you find more?

But documents from the 18th century, when the United States was founded, are written in English that, with a couple of differences, is essentially modern. We sell ourselves short when we think we can’t read them. There are a few things to learn, such as the long “s,” which looks like an “f,” the relatively nonstandard spelling and punctuation and some unfamiliar abbreviations. Another key to learning how to read 18th- and 19th-century writing is just to spend time looking at it, learning the writing conventions of the relatively recent past, as well as the idiosyncrasies of individual writers. In time, the letters of George Washington will become as familiar to you as, say, a postcard from your Uncle Melvin.

We saw living proof of this at a Nov. 19 event at the Library marking the 155th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Members of the public and students from local Washington, D.C., schools were invited to the Library to view a copy of the Gettysburg Address and try their hands at transcribing letters and other documents in the Abraham Lincoln Papers on the Library’s newly launched crowdsourcing website. Titled “By the People,” the site makes images of thousands of original documents available to volunteers online, inviting them to type documents, tag them with keywords to make them searchable and review typed documents for accuracy. The transcripts are then added to the Library’s website alongside the original documents.

Here is an example of what the long “s” looked like in print. From “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved,” a 1764 book by James Otis.

At first, many of the visitors on Nov. 19, viewing 19th-century handwriting, said “I can’t read this.” But when asked to pick out a letter or word anywhere on the page and then build on that kernel of understanding, they soon started to identify familiar words, then phrases. By the end of a half hour, they were able to read 70 percent or more of documents. Dozens teamed up to arrange the full text of the Gettysburg Address using a large-format printed “puzzle” made of the words composing Lincoln’s speech. They eagerly hunted through piles, looking for letters and words that were becoming increasingly familiar.

Many said they wished that cursive was still taught in schools, as do many people who come to the Library. Some teachers and students vowed to take the project back into their classrooms or afterschool clubs.

Although we live in a world where writing by hand is less necessary than before, it is vital that we keep the knowledge of cursive and other handwriting alive. “By the People” is just one way in which you can encounter original documents and hone your skills, but we encourage you to give it a try. The more you transcribe and review, the more you will learn. At the same time, you will help to make Library of Congress collections more readily available for everyone.

Scroll down for more examples.

George Washington used the long “s” only occasionally. In this 1782 letter, written during the Revolutionary War, paragraph two begins: “I am fully perswaded that it is unnecefsary.”

 

Thomas Jefferson routinely used some idiosyncratic spellings, and he generally did not capitalize the first word in a sentence. In this 1788 letter to James Madison, the second sentence begins: “the first part of this long silence in me was occasioned by a knoledge [knowledge] that you were absent from N. York.” Then he complains that a pamphlet Madison sent him “unluckily omitted exactly the pafsage [passage] I wanted, which was what related to the navigation of the Mifsisipi [Mississippi].”

Comments (17)

  1. I love all of this!! Except the part where people can’t read cursive anymore– but all the stuff Library of Congress is doing! 🙂

  2. Thanks for posting this. I’m having fun with Clara Barton. Her handwriting changed over time (she got messier, and words trailed off), but it’s so much fun! It’s like being a detective: you sleuth out (is that a term?) who she’s talking about, and things start to become clearer. I’ve learned a lot about the Civil War. Warning: it’s very addictive! Thanks for giving us the opportunity to contribute.

  3. Thank you for this post. I have long championed the use of cursive. One of my sons at seventeen had dreadfully small, cramped handwriting. When I reproached him about this, his reply was that he didn’t need to improved his handwriting, because in the future he would have a secretary. 35 years later, he has a secretary and he hand writes much of his personal letters. He has learned that his clients really appreciate the personal touch of his notes.

  4. Can anyone volunteer to help transcribe these documents? I enjoy it and seem to have a knack for it.

  5. Crowdsourcing this task is an excellent idea. I’d like to see other projects such as converting texts from Old and Middle English into Modern English.

  6. Stop me if you’ve heard this: I know a chap who started teaching at Cal Berkeley before he graduated. Imagine my surprise when he told me he couldn’t write ..

  7. A few years ago I transcribed a 1759 account book that detailed transactions of various members of Rogers Rangers in the British army. Fortunately, the handwriting was generally easy to understand, but it did take three rounds of transcribing and correcting to produce what I believe is a 99% accurate transcription. I was shocked about six years ago when, as the director of the museum where this document is held, a college intern, when asked to transcribe some 19th century handwritten documents, revealed that she could not read cursive at all. She was a history major. I realized at that moment that college history programs should be teaching students how to read cursive. This is a necessary skill. I hope that colleges and universities are stepping up.

  8. I have told several many friends of my age — if you need to send a confidential or coded message, just write it in plain English in cursive.

  9. Q: Why is it called cursive?
    A: Because the pen follows a continuous course across the line. Key word – ‘course’ from which ‘cursive’ is derived.

    Q: What’s with the long S?
    A: The long S is derived from the handwritten script of the Romans, from which most of our letter forms derive. It appears singly in archaic English handwriting and printing, and often in sets of double S words to differentiate if from the second S. It typically appears in the middle of a word. I have never seen it as the first letter of a sentence.
    Because metal type can not swoop below an adjacent letter, printers of the previous metal-type era used an adaptation that looks much like the letter F, but without the line at mid-stem.It was the best they could do.

  10. I learned Copper plate cursive when I started school by Queensland Primary Correspondence School. We did pages of loops, pot-hooks etc learning how to make up-strokes light and down-strokes darker (with pencil). Later I used a nib pen. This was more difficult as I am left handed. But now reading cursive is normal!

  11. I am happy that the Library of Congress has taken the initiative to dedicate an article to the significance of transcribing documents written in cursive. As a Dance Educator 7 years ago I realized as a proctor of a SAT test in a room full of 22 students only 3 of them could copy a printed certification statement from the College Board in cursive and a lot of the students could barely sign their names in cursive. I feel that handwriting is a lost graphic art form which is connected to literacy and should be taught in education in today’s technologically savvy world.
    Melba Lucas

  12. Response from Victoria Van Hyning:

    Thank you, everyone, for your responses to our post.

    In answer to Shirley’s question, everyone is welcome to take part in our crowdsourcing project. You can transcribe without creating an account, or you can sign up for account in order to review other people’s transcriptions. There is also a discussion forum where you can speak with fellow volunteers and community managers. Visit https://crowd.loc.gov/ and get started today!

    John, there are a number of crowdsourcing projects devoted to text transcription, including an early modern manuscript project called Shakespeare’s World (https://www.shakespearesworld.org/#/) created by the crowdsourcing group called Zooniverse.org at Oxford University, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Oxford English Dictionary. Volunteers are invited to transcribe the documents exactly as they see them, and then Folger library staff do the work of modernizing these for publication on Early Modern Manuscripts Online (https://emmo.folger.edu/). I am not aware of any Old or Middle English projects that invite translation or modernization, but that sounds like a great idea.

    Thanks again.

  13. Great article. I’m a corporate archivist and I’ve been recently reading the diaries of one of the founders of our company. As you said, you do get used to the author’s style — and you pick up the names, phrases, locations that are frequently mentioned. I’m excited to check out your crowdsourcing project!

  14. I just now discovered this conversation and must join in because I find myself on an emotional roller coaster. I have been gleefully working on pages from each of the collections, and I am simply tickled pink at this opportunity. I can actually see how Walt Whitman’s mind was working, how he was actually thinking as he wrote his poems. I have spoken about little else in my recent conversations. But now I am saddened at the thought of people not knowing how to read cursive writing. Sad in the same way that a young person recently told me she didn’t have to know how to sign her name because “everything will use facial recognition”. I will continue to spread the word about these crowdsourcing projects and champion the cause to teach cursive writing. Mahalo and aloha.

  15. Thanks for taking part Renee! I am glad to see your comment here, and your similarly enthusiastic comments on History Hub, the By the People project discussion forum: https://historyhub.history.gov/community/crowd-loc. We appreciate your contributions to the project, and hope that as more and more people come into contact with cursive documents, and give themselves an opportunity to try transcription, they’ll discover just how much they already know, and how fun it can be to decipher handwriting. Whatever happens with the technologies of the future, cursive is still a significant part of our shared history. Exploring the past is vital to who we are, and being able to read a document in the original format will never lose its thrill.

  16. This is a very important recollection of history through actively engaging 21st century writers in the art or science of transcription. The mathematical skill required in being calculative of the connectedness of letters to words, and eventually sentences tells of the interdisciplinary nature of Transcription. More students of different fields asides the humanities should be introduced to cursive reading.

  17. I am having a problem with one word in a letter from my great-grandfather to his wife in 1893, and I’ve consulted several people to no avail. He’s writing about sending her $50.00 in New York [?????], so presumably some reference to currency. If anyone has a suggestion on whom to consult, I would be most grateful! The rest of the letter is pretty clear and not helpful for the letters in this word.

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