“Simple Cryptography”

By Scott Hamilton

I learned something quite interesting this week reading about the need for people capable of reading cursive writing to volunteer for the National Archives. As it turns out cursive writing may actually be the best way to keep your information private. Artificial Intelligence deep learning algorithms used to do handwriting and text recognition from old documents in the National Archives are failing miserably to correctly transcribe the text of many historic documents because of the large variation in letter formation when people write in cursive. Reading cursive text appears to be one area that AI may never be capable of doing.

So why did I title the article “Simple Cryptography?” It comes down to the most basic definition of cryptography, the art of writing or solving codes. As it turns out, not only is cursive difficult for computers to read, it is also becoming increasingly more difficult for younger people to decipher. So by the very basic definition, cursive writing is becoming a form of cryptography. What better way to erase history than to fail teaching the manuscript that was used to write a majority of historic documents. The National Archives is filled with documents written in cursive, dating back more than 200 years, and they are getting more difficult to read and understand, mainly because of a lack of education in young Americans. As of July 2024 only 24 of our 50 states require cursive handwriting instruction, up from only 14 states in 2016.

When did cursive handwriting instruction decline in our public school systems? The new Common Core State Standard for education failed to include it in their requirements, and as a result most schools in the nation stopped providing instruction for it. Many of these same schools have begun to realize the mistake as they try to introduce important documents, like “The Declaration of Independence” and the original U.S. Constitution. I am sad to say that Missouri is one of the states that currently does not require instruction in cursive. Two hundred years ago students began learning cursive right along with print characters.

The New York Post published an article on January 17, 2025 – “Reading cursive is now a ‘superpower.’ National Archives seeks help to transcribe 300 million documents.”It was this article that spawned the idea for this week’s Tech Talk. I decided to dig deeper and see if handwriting recognition software was successful at recognizing cursive writing. As I stated in the open paragraph, the automated recognition of cursive characters has a very long way to go. It is the lack of AI technology to transcribe cursive documents that brought about the need for human volunteers at the National Archives. They have transcribed a lot of printed works to digital formats that can be indexed and searched by computer through the use of AI technologies, but failed to transcribe around 300 million other documents in this manner.

A majority of the documents that could not be read by the AI are in cursive, and a few are from old printing presses with hand carved characters. At first it was thought to be a result of poor quality images of the documents until they tried to rescan a significant number at a higher quality and had the same failure rates. So it seems pretty safe to assume that AI is not capable of reading our nation’s history, and considering that last year it was shown that 70 percent of all content on the internet is AI generated, we can see how our future generations could forget our history.

If you look back at ancient cultures, even ones who still have living members of the population, the first place they begin to lose their history is when they lose their language. The Native Americans have worked hard to keep their languages alive, but sadly the languages are in rapid decline, and without translating their history into modern languages it will be lost. We are facing the same situation with our history, even though it is recorded in fairly modern English. We still know and speak the language; we are losing the skills necessary to read the recorded history.

I would like readers to do two things with this information, one is to volunteer to transcribe some of the documents at the National Archives. Even 30 minutes of your time a week could make a big difference. The second is to reach out to your local school board and insist that cursive be taught once again in our schools. It would be a real shame to lose our history and heritage over a lack of education. For more information on volunteering you can go to https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/missions and create a free account. You don’t have to apply, take a test, or do anything special to volunteer, just sign-up, find a document you are interested in and begin transcribing. Who knows? You might actually learn something new about our history in the process. Until next week stay safe and learn something new.

Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@te**********.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.