Reading the Past: How Duke Students Are Teaching Computers to Read Four-Hundred-Year-Old Handwriting
Adriane Fresh, Assistant Research Professor at Duke’s Social Science Research Institute (and MIDS faculty), had been talking with colleague Nick Eubank, Associate Research Professor at the same institute (and MIDS Director), about a collection of documents she had spent years gathering: port books from sixteenth and seventeenth century England. These handwritten ledgers recorded the ships, cargoes, taxes, and merchants that moved through English ports during one of the most turbulent economic periods in the country’s history. Fresh had been describing how difficult the records were to work with when Eubank happened to have one of them pulled up on his computer.
Astrid Giugni, a computational humanist and MIDS faculty member, walked by and saw it on the screen. According to Fresh, Giugni was immediately curious about what she was looking at, and Eubank explained that the documents were part of a larger collection Fresh had been gathering and trying to make sense of.