Cursive writing & Land Surveyors
Tip: for those documents written in cursive. A lot of times I will type them out as I read them and just leave underscores for words/numbers I cannot yet determine. Then staple a print of that to the back or add it as a second page on the PDF file. That way next time I need to read it, I can MUCH faster.
Never thought of it this way, but it could be a service I provide to younger surveyors that can't read cursive.
My phone, like everybodies, has a speech to text feature as an aid to composing emails and texts. Read the text of your cursive deed into an email and send it to yourself.
I do this with a lot of descriptions, especially those that are long and contain several clauses. If its a good clean copy I use OCR to get it into Word where I format it so that each "thence" begins a new line. If it's cursive or just a bad copy I do the cell phone trick.
My dad, a retired PLS, and my sister, a current elementary school teacher, have this debate all the time:
Dad: "How are any future surveyors going to read old GLO notes if you don't teach them cursive? "
Sis: "How are there going to be any surveyors if I don't have time to teach them math, science, or English?"
Me: "I bet they had this debate in ancient Egypt when hyroglyphics were going out of style."
K-12 schools should not waste kids time teaching them cursive.
Eventually someone will write a program that reads cursive and converts it to text. To a degree it exists already.
I wont say I don't think there will never be a computer application that can decipher most cursive writing, but I do feel that there will need to be some human input to assist the computer with figuring out some of the old "s" and "f" and maybe some "q" characters. Maybe they will use word recognition to try to fill in the spaces. The trouble with that is the version of word on my computer now doesn't like the word "Vara", as a quick example, along with several other survey terms. It certainly does not like many of the names, lots of which have fallen from fashion in the last century, which would again need a person to decipher. The difference between the Brito family and the Brilo family is several hundreds of acres. If you do not feel that being able to read old documents is important, can I hand you a neatly lettered copy of the Declaration of Independence, which might or might not say the same as what the original says? How would someone who can't read cursive know the difference?
Very soon, cursive writing will be a secret code for old people.
The best cursive writing I have seen is in Letters Patent from the Crown, circa mid 1700's, just perfect and incredibly easy to read
the worst is some form of Gothic cursive that seems to have been a fad in the 1800s for a short period of time.
Jim
K-12 schools should not waste kids time teaching them cursive.
Why the heck not? Too challenging?
This issue doesn't JUST affect "surveyors."
What about;
Title folks, attorneys, GIS technicians, historians, genealogy researchers, the list goes on & on...
Loyal
The ability to read in the future will not be the domain of just "old folks". I've heard some say that in the future, only the highly educated upper crust will be able to read cursive. I hope so. That's the only way I'll ever be considered upper crust!
