The National Archives needs help from people with special skills: reading cursive. The Archives Office is looking for volunteer citizen archivists to help them classify and/or transcribe more than 200 years of handwritten historical documents. Most of these are from the Revolutionary War era, known for their smooth and flowing handwriting.
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“Reading cursive is a superpower,” says Suzanne Isaacs, community manager at the National Archives Catalogue told USA today. “It’s not just about whether you learned cursive in school, it’s about how much you use cursive today.”
Isaacs coordinates more than 5,000 citizen archivists who help read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects in the catalog. Volunteers can help with everything from pension administration, field notes taken by geographers working on the Mason-Dixon line, on immigration and Census.
Interested volunteers can do that register onlineno application required. Reading a handwritten script can help, but some records don’t require it. Revolutionary War pension records have a “no italics required option,” where volunteers can help tag the texts that have already been transcribed so they are easier to find.
Cursive learning used to be the standard in classrooms across the United States, with handwriting assessed. Once typewriters became common and later computers, it started to disappear. Common Core Education Standards emphasized keyboard typing in 2010. However, fourteen states still require cursive to be taught in schools, regardless of how little it is used in everyday life.
In 2023, the state of California passed a law that makes this possible requires teaching “cursive or merged cursive” from first through sixth grades. Reading historical documents from primary sources – such as those in the National Archives – was cited as a major reason behind the law. There is also some evidence that learning cursive benefits the brain.
“More and more neuroscience research supports the idea that writing cursive letters, especially compared to typing, can activate specific neural pathways that facilitate and optimize overall learning and language development,” says neuroscientist Claudia Aguirre. told the BBC after the California law was passed.
The research into writing something by hand versus typing shows that it is still true it is most advantageous to write with pen and paper. However, the biggest benefits for both memory and learning new words come from writing alone and not from using cursive instead of print.
[ Related: Why writing by hand is better for remembering things.]
According to the National Archivesartificial intelligence (AI) is starting to be able to read cursive, but still needs human help. They cooperated Looking for familyan AI genealogy nonprofit operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to search and access historical documents. Due to the large number of errors, someone is still needed to do the final editing of the document. AI can have difficulty with rips, tears, stains, erasures, ink bleeding through the paper, older forms of letters, inventive spelling, and more.
For those who want to practice or learn their cursive skills, Southwestern Illinois College has a list of resources.