Bad Handwriting: Cold, Leaky, Drunk

Three factors that can alter handwriting: weather (cold), the functionality of writing implement, and the influence of alcohol.  

This was my favorite fun fact from the Conference on Automatic Pattern Recognition and Historical Handwriting Analysis

A sloppy pen, no heat and booze, surely more than a few intellectuals have had to grapple these three.  In addition to needing Hemingway's (phallically) clean, well-lit place, writers have always needed heat, smoothly flowing ink and more coffee. Bad or just old handwriting can be a problem.

Have you ever dragged yourself to some hidden away Eastern European castle only to discover that you could not read the handwriting in the archive.  Yes, you could spend the next six months deciphering the script, or you could stroll down to the town below the castle and order a schnitzel, no beer because then you'll only end up napping in over an ancient manuscript.  Now there is a brave new digital future that will allow those of us who never took the summer seminar on handwriting analysis to poke around the left-over manuscripts of the past.  Software that recognizes patterns in handwriting so that a legible modern text can be produced.  

This would be a great relief to those of us not trained in the history of handwriting.  The possibilities were discussed at Automatic Pattern Recognition and Historical Handwriting Analysis Seminar.  If you weren't there but want to know what was said, the conference organizers filed a nifty report in German.  They have this nice tradition of writing up a summary of the papers given at a conference, so that if you never made it near the place, you can still learn what was going on during the question and answer period.

 A swift translation of the conclusion:

The increasingly sophisticated digitalization of primary texts will do more than create a significant change in the reception and methodologies used to read manuscripts, it offers new approaches to digital analysis and indexing, that should result in new interpretations.  The most important questions discussed at the conference concerned the segmentation and extraction of graphic elements and markings in digitalized manuscript sources.  It also became clear that the layout design of digital documents needs to be developed further.  Word Spotting was mentioned frequently, yet scholars also work with other systems such as Text Retrieval, Clustering and Similarity Computation which run on algorithms.  Multispectral Imaging as a form of Image Enhancement offers other possibilities.

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