We forgot about the other side
A Chicago library is crowdsourcing cursive translation. The reason why is more unsettling than the problem itself.
Sometimes, something so obvious just isn't!
The Newberry Library in Chicago is looking for volunteers. Not to shelve books or scan documents. To read. Specifically, to read cursive handwriting — because they've got more of it in their archives than they can handle and not enough people who can decode it.
We've been talking about the death of cursive for years. The conversation is always framed the same way: children aren't being taught to write it. Schools dropped it from the curriculum. Future generations won't produce it.
Nobody seemed to think about the other half of that sentence.
If you can't write it, you can't read it either.
That seems obvious in retrospect. But I genuinely hadn't made the connection until I read about the Newberry's problem — that they have a vast, irreplaceable archive of documents, letters, diaries, records, and manuscripts that are becoming inaccessible. Not because they're damaged. Not because they're lost. Because the people who might one day want to access them won't be able to.
The knowledge is there. The ability to reach it is fading.
There's a layer on top of this that I also hadn't quite joined up. Voice-to-text has changed the way most people interact with the written word. Not typing — speaking. Words appearing on a screen rather than being formed by a hand. It is, in almost every measurable way, faster and more convenient. I use it myself. I have built a lot of tools that use it, like Review Engine. But the hand still has to write sometimes.
A birthday card.
A note.
A signature on something that matters.
And when the hand hasn't practiced, when it's been years since a pen was used for anything more demanding than a signature, the result is what you'd charitably call expressive.
Handwriting that looked like penmanship a generation ago now looks like a prescription written in a hurry.
So we have a double problem forming. People who are older grew up with cursive but may be out of practice. People who are younger may never have learnt it at all. And the voice generation — the ones who'll grow up dictating everything — will arrive at adulthood with a relationship to the written word that is entirely passive consumption. They'll read it on screens. They will not have produced it by hand, and they will not be able to read it in its historical form.
The Newberry's volunteer project is called Scripto. They're using crowdsourcing to get through the backlog — ordinary people transcribing documents so the content can be made searchable and accessible. It's a clever solution to an immediate problem.
But it assumes there are enough people who can still do it.
That pool is shrinking. Not catastrophically, not yet — there are still plenty of people who grew up with cursive, who remember being drilled on loops and joins, who can sit down with an 18th-century letter and work through it, even if it takes a while. But those people are ageing. And the generation behind them has a much thinner relationship with script.
We will build AI to close the gap, obviously. There are already tools that transcribe historical handwriting with reasonable accuracy. The technology will improve. The problem will not go unsolved. But there is something worth naming in this, beyond the practical question of archive access.
Every generation inherits something from the one before it. Not just objects and stories and habits — but capacities. The ability to do something, to know something, to make something by hand. Some of those inheritances we protect deliberately. We teach children to read because we understand what illiteracy costs.
We didn't protect this one.
We decided it wasn't worth the curriculum space, and then we didn't think through what else we were giving up when we let it go.
The Newberry's volunteers are doing something important. They're building a bridge between a form of communication that's fading and a world that increasingly can't access it without translation.
That's an act of cultural preservation. It just doesn't look like one. It looks like someone squinting at a scanned letter from 1743.
I hadn't thought about the other side. The reading side of not writing cursive.
I should have. We all should have.
Once you see it, it's obvious: you learn to read and write at the same time, from the same materials, practising the same forms. Drop the writing and you don't just lose production. You lose recognition.
The handwriting on your grandmother's letters — the formal loops, the ink pressed a little harder on downstrokes — becomes as foreign as a language you never learnt.