Artificial Intelligence Is Cracking Open the Vatican's Secret Archives
theatlantic.com
Trey Gordner
2184 days ago
tl; A breakthrough in OCR has scholars running with the (papal) bulls. New approach makes transcribing the Vatican's manuscripts as easy as your lunch receipt.
jigsaw segmentation, plus crowdsourced training of the software—could easily be adapted to read texts in other languages. This could potentially do for handwritten documents what Google Books did for printed matter: open up letters, journals, diaries, and other papers to researchers around the world