How to read cursive handwriting in historical documents

Cursive handwriting has a rich history. The first people to write cursive letters were the ancient Romans, who used a form of cursive writing called “scriptura continua” for speed and efficiency. Over the centuries, handwriting has evolved and changed, with each era having its own distinctive style. However, despite these changes, one thing has remained constant: it is a challenge to read cursive writing.

Cursive reading was once a labour-intensive task that required a great deal of skill and expertise. Scholars and historians would spend countless hours poring over old historical documents, trying to learn cursive writing. This process was time-consuming and frustrating and often yielded few results.

However, with the advent of AI-powered text recognition technology, reading cursive letters has become a much easier and more efficient process. These advanced technologies can quickly and accurately interpret historical documents, handwritten letters, and any other type of cursive script, making it possible to uncover the hidden stories and insights that these sources contain.

In this post, we will explore the history of cursive handwriting and the challenges of reading historical documents. We will also look at the revolutionary impact of AI-powered text recognition technology, and how it is making it possible to unlock the secrets of the past like never before.

How to read cursive handwriting without technology

Learning to read old handwriting without the help of technology is quite a slow process, and requires a lot of patience. The best strategy is to start small. Read a couple of documents for context—try to get the gist but you don’t have to understand every word. It can help to look for common words such as “the” or proper nouns like the names of places or people that you know will probably be mentioned in the document. There might also be common phrases such as “to whom it may concern” or “last will and testament”, which are perhaps easier to recognise.

Another useful strategy when learning to read old handwriting is to pay attention to the way the letters are formed. In cursive writing, the letters are joined together in a flowing manner, and the direction of the pen strokes can provide valuable clues about the letters being written. For example, the letter “e” is often written with a downward stroke, while the letter “t” is often written with an upward stroke.

By paying attention to the cursive shapes, you can begin to piece together the words and phrases in the document, even if you don’t recognise every letter.

Creating a key for cursive letters

Once you’ve identified a few words or phrases, create an alphabet key, showing how the writer writes each individual cursive letter. Most people go for a traditional table, with the cursive letters in one column and the printed letters in a column next to it. You can then use this key to transcribe the rest of the document, adding new letters as you go.

Manually transcribing cursive writing in this way is quite time-consuming at first but it does become easier as your eyes get used to the letters. Over time, you will naturally become quicker at reading handwriting style variations, particularly if the styles all come from the same time period or type of document. Reading old cursive writing is an art, and one that takes patience to develop.

How to read old handwriting with text recognition technology

Nowadays though, transcribing old handwriting doesn’t have to be a long and tedious process. In recent years, text recognition technology has revolutionised the process. Text recognition platforms such as Transkribus use artificial intelligence to learn how to read the handwriting in historical material, just like a human would. They then use this knowledge to automatically transcribe large numbers of documents at a much faster rate than a human could ever achieve manually.

If you’ve heard of optical character recognition (OCR), then handwritten text recognition is pretty similar. However, there is one key difference: OCR is only capable of accurately reading familiar printed letters. That is because there is a finite number of printed fonts in the world and so it is easier for a computer programme to learn how to read them all.

When it comes to styles of handwriting, there is an infinite number of possible styles, each individual to the person who wrote it. In addition, how a person writes in one situation (for example, on a form) might be very different to how they write in another situation (such as on a greeting card). Text recognition software has to be good at understanding these increasingly complex forms of writing, and therefore the technology behind it needs to be more sophisticated.

Reading cursive with Transkribus

The quickest way to transcribe documents with Transkribus is to use a public AI model. These are like manuals programmed by people in the Transkribus community, which tell the platform how to read a certain type of cursive handwriting, for example, ‘English handwriting’ or ‘German Kurrent’.

In addition, Transkribus also offers transformer-based ‘Super Models’, which use advanced AI technology to create more accurate transcriptions, even without materials that would be otherwise difficult to decipher. There are Super Models available for English, Dutch, and Spanish, among other languages.

Training your own text recognition model

If there isn’t a suitable public model for the handwriting in your specific documents, then you can also train a custom model. First, you need to provide some ‘Ground Truth’ data. This consists of images of documents that you have manually transcribed on Transkribus, or pre-transcribed documents that you have uploaded from another source. The Ground Truth teaches the platform which cursive letters represent which printed characters and a model is created based on that information (a bit like the alphabet key in the example above).

The platform then uses this custom model to automatically transcribe other documents, and make educated guesses about letters it has never seen before. This way, Transkribus can accurately transcribe documents at the click of a button, no matter which language or handwriting they are written in.

Is it quicker to transcribe manually or with AI?

The only way to find out how much time AI can save you is to try out both methods. Transcribe a few pages of handwriting without technology, then run them through Transkribus and compare how long each method takes you.

A good way to get a feel for if Transkribus is right for your documents is to use the Quick Text Recognition feature. This is available on the homepage of the Transkribus platform, or at Transkribus.ai. The Quick Text Recognition feature allows you to drag and drop a file into Transkribus, choose the language, and create an automatic transcription in a matter of seconds. If your documents are written in a common language and script — and have a conventional layout, such as a letter — then this is a time efficient way to transcribe your documents.

If you want to transcribe more than one document at once, or your collection is a little more complex, then we recommend carrying out a full text recognition using either a public model, or a custom model you have trained yourself.

For more information about performing text recognition with Transkribus, see our Beginner’s Guide, or watch the video below.