Combining Human and Machine Transcriptions on the Zooniverse Platform

Abstract

Transcribing handwritten documents to create fully searchable texts is an essential part of the archival process. Traditional text recognition methods, such as optical character recognition (OCR), do not work on handwritten documents due to their frequent noisiness and OCR’s need for individually segmented letters. Crowdsourcing and improved machine models are two modern methods for transcribing handwritten documents.