Cornell Chronicle: Programming tool turns handwriting into computer code. “The pen-based interface, called Notate, lets users of computational, digital notebooks – such as Jupyter notebooks, which are web-based and interactive – to open drawing canvases and handwrite diagrams within lines of traditional, digitized computer code.”
The Atlantic: Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive. “In 2010, cursive was omitted from the new national Common Core standards for K–12 education. The students in my class, and their peers, were then somewhere in elementary school. Handwriting instruction had already been declining as laptops and tablets and lessons in ‘keyboarding’ assumed an ever more prominent place in the classroom. Most of my students remembered getting no more than a year or so of somewhat desultory cursive training, which was often pushed aside by a growing emphasis on ‘teaching to the test.’ Now in college, they represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.”
Siberian Federal University: Russian Scientists Have Taught a neural network to read handwritten Letters of the Russian Alphabet . “SibFU scientists have developed a new convolutional neural network (CNN) capable of recognizing images of handwritten letters with high accuracy. The resulting algorithm transforms the image and recognizes the letter encrypted in it. According to the scientists, the algorithm’s accuracy is 99 %.”
How-To Geek: Chromebooks Get a New “Cursive” App for Handwritten Notes. “Google has been testing its new ‘Cursive’ notetaking application on select Chromebooks, and now it’s officially available on any Chromebook that supports stylus input.”
University of Calgary: Machine learning tool increases accuracy of diagnosis in Parkinson’s disease. “The tool, designed by the Cumming School of Medicine Optogenetics Core Facility and CaPRI researchers (Calgary Parkinson Research Initiative) is a simple machine learning model capable of outperforming deep-learning models in detecting Parkinson’s disease from digitized handwriting samples. While deep-learning techniques have expanded the possibilities to facilitate the integration of decision-support systems into clinical medicine, they are associated with added computational complexity, the need for large datasets, and can have an astounding ecological effect in terms of carbon footprint.”
VentureBeat: Facebook’s AI can copy the style of text in photos from a single word. “Facebook today introduced TextStyleBrush, an AI research project that can copy the style of text in a photo from just a single word. The company claims that TextStyleBrush, which can edit and replace arbitrary text in images, is the first ‘unsupervised’ system of its kind that can recognize both typefaces and handwriting.”
ScienceDaily: Brain computer interface turns mental handwriting into text on screen. “For the first time, researchers have deciphered the brain activity associated with trying to write letters by hand. Working with a participant with paralysis who has sensors implanted in his brain, the team used an algorithm to identify letters as he attempted to write them. Then, the system displayed the text on a screen — in real time.”
BBC: AI unlocks ancient Dead Sea Scrolls mystery. “Researchers say Artificial Intelligence (AI) has for the first time shown that two scribes wrote part of the mysterious ancient Dead Sea Scrolls. Tests were carried out on the longest text, known as the Great Isaiah Scroll. It was found that probably two unknown individuals had copied down the words using near-identical handwriting.”
ScienceBlog: Why Writing By Hand Makes Kids Smarter. “Professor Audrey van der Meer at NTNU believes that national guidelines should be put into place to ensure that children receive at least a minimum of handwriting training. Results from several studies have shown that both children and adults learn more and remember better when writing by hand. Now another study confirms the same: choosing handwriting over keyboard use yields the best learning and memory.”
University of Connecticut: UConn Library, School of Engineering to Expand Handwritten Text Recognition. “The UConn Library and the School of Engineering are working to develop new technology that applies machine learning to handwriting text recognition that will allow researchers to have improved access to handwritten historic documents. Handwritten documents are essential for researchers, but are often inaccessible because they are unable to be searched even after they are digitized. The Connecticut Digital Archive, a project of the UConn Library, is working to change that with a $24,277 grant awarded through the Catalyst Fund of LYRASIS, a nonprofit organization that supports access to academic, scientific, and cultural heritage.”
Times of India: You can now copy handwritten paper notes to your PC using Google Lens. “Image recognition app Google Lens now comes with another useful feature which allows you to convert handwritten paper notes to digital text files and transfers them directly to your computer.”
SC Times: St. John’s Hill Museum & Manuscript Library receives $1.4 million grant. “The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at St. John’s University received more than $1.4 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support its mission to preserve and share the world’s handwritten heritage. The grant will fund a three-year project to catalog 53,000 digitized manuscripts and create an online database of authors and titles originating from underrepresented or little-known literary traditions, according to a news release issued by the university Tuesday.”
Route Fifty: The Legislative Push to Bring Back Cursive. “Loop the T, hold the pen just so, practice writing, ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’: if legislators in Wisconsin have their way, elementary school students will soon become versed in the lost art of cursive handwriting instruction.”
Museums+Heritage: National Trust digitises Churchill’s visitors book to offer new interactive experience. “The National Trust has digitised the entries of the visitors book at Chartwell, Churchill’s former home in Kent. Signatures from over 700 guests who visited the estate between 1924 and 1964 are now available to the public via a new interactive resource.”
Science Blog: Shakespeare’s Mystery Annotator Identified As John Milton. “It is well known that Shakespeare was a huge influence on Milton. From learning how to write nature poetry to creating charismatic villains, Milton’s debt to his forebear continues to fascinate experts. The younger poet once praised the ‘wonder and astonishment’ that this ‘great heir of fame’ conjured up in his readers. But now, Jason Scott-Warren from Cambridge’s English Faculty believes he has identified even more tangible evidence of this connection.”
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