02 · The label
Historical handwriting
What does this nineteenth-century label say?
- Status
- Specified, unbuilt
- Field
- Thin — some prior work
- Who wants it
- Every herbarium with a backlog. Which is every herbarium.
Why it matters
Printed label OCR is solved. Cursive is not, and it is the single largest blocker on mass digitisation. Millions of sheets stay dark because nobody can read them at scale.
What it needs
Transcription pairs from historical labels, per-collector.
State of the art
Active but unsolved. General handwriting models degrade badly on botanical Latin and place names.
Next head
Collector attribution →