How AI could reveal secrets of thousands of handwritten documents – from medieval manuscripts to hieroglyphics

By Mark Faulkner, Assistant Professor in Medieval Literature and Director, Trinity Centre for the Book, Trinity College Dublin

Have you ever struggled to read what that scrawl between “carrots” and “potatoes” is on your shopping list? Soon, artificial intelligence (AI) may be able to help.

Over the last ten years, researchers have gradually been working out how to teach computers to read handwritten documents. As in most machine learning, a computer is fed training data: in this case, images of handwriting and details of what it says. It then learns how the marks on each page correspond to letters. It learns…

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