Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Approaches to Cursive Handwriting Transcription: Lessons from the Blythe Owen Letters Project

Partnered with Dr. Rodney Summerscales in finding a computer sciences student who could help me determine if applying Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software practices to the transcription of Blythe Owen's corpus of letters would be advisable. Both faculty members mentored Jazmyne Lavalas through the process of selecting and testing several OCR products on the letter dataset. Summerscales focused on the technical aspects, Kordas on the overall research design and reporting of results.

The ensuing published article is the result of co-writing between Kordas and Lavalas with additional input from Summerscales. Lavalas did the design and testing of the OCR products and wrote the base portions of the paper that form the project report; Kordas performed the literature review and heavy editing/polishing to the published version of the entire paper to make it cohesive.