Archivists Turn to LLMs to Decipher Handwriting at Scale
TL;DR
When I sat down with bell hooks’ personal journals at an archive at Berea College in Kentucky, I expected an intimate peek into her private thoughts, her voice before the editing. What I got instead was frustration. Her handwriting was dense cursive, all loops that looked identical to my eye, and there were years of journals to go through. I found myself photographing pages and feeding them to ChatGPT just to read what she’d written.
Nauti's Take
Nice use case: LLMs unlock decades of journals, letters and admin records for research — material that used to cost specialists months. Risk: transcriptions without clear confidence labels can carry wrong readings into quotes and academic papers.
Practical: archives should treat LLM output as first-pass reading aid, not final transcription — and always keep an original snippet alongside.
Sources