The University of the Pacific is crowdsourcing the deciphering of John Muir’s field journals. The story is at our local paper, here, along with instructions on how to work the UOP Muir website.
From the article, Muir would take a journal book on his journeys and:
If you’re interested, check it out.
I’m not going to get to it today, so I’m posting this to keep from forgetting it.
Sounds like a fascinating project, though. I have some experience in trying to read manuscript documents (a number from a Victorian hyperpolygot with microscopic handwriting - you can’t even count on English context to help out).
Pretty cool. That’s how the LDS gets the US Census sheets transcribed to a legible database. I worked on that one for 1940 and quite often the sheets were nearly illegible.
You may get a nice, warm feeling, but they don’t guarantee it.
That sounds very interesting. My youngest gave me some experience deciphering handwriting. I wouldn’t have thought so if I hadn’t later done some temping, grading standardized tests with essay portions. I could usually puzzle out things that stumped most of the other graders.