History alumnus, Jeff Blackadar, has just published a new paper. The abstract is below with the full paper, Transcribing Handwritten Text with Python and Microsoft Azure Computer Vision, available online.

Abstract

Tools for machine transcription of handwriting are practical and labour-saving if you need to analyse or present text in digital form. This lesson will explain how to write a Python program to transcribe handwritten documents using Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services, a commercially available service that has a cost-free option for low volumes of use.

About Jeff Blackadar

Jeff Blackadar is a former History with Data Science MA student at Carleton University; this lesson emerges from some of his research and teaches historians how to get their computer to transcribe hand-written documents.