Posts

Showing posts with the label Odds And Ends

How To Process Handwritten Latin with AI OCR (Odds And Ends)

Image
So you’ve been trying to do some historical research, but you’re vexed by the old-time habit of English people not writing in English? You’ve come to the right place. Highbrow scholars used to conduct their correspondence in the languages of the ancients, using so many extra words that it’d put Charles Dickens to shame, except Dickens very sensibly wrote in his native tongue, which gives him a real advantage here. 1600s London literati — like the usual suspect, Baldwin Hamey — didn’t do us that favor. The method I've used and demonstrated in this guide, to extract handwritten Latin text and process it into English, relies on an AI-powered version of OCR technology (optical character recognition). Here's how.