I built an agent that reads 200-year-old handwriting — the interesting part is what it refuses to do

The National Archives Catalog holds 34,309,409 records. Most of the handwritten material in it has never been transcribed, which means it is not full-text searchable, which means it is effectively invisible: you can only find a document if you already know it exists. The people who fix that are volunteers in the Citizen Archivist programme, typing...