Handwriting, Recognition, and Artificial Intelligence

3 credits · Undergraduate

Handwriting is one of the most important and long-lived communication technologies. Without it, human experience and endeavor would be lost to time. Consider hieroglyphic law-codes or the Dead Sea Scrolls; graffiti at Stonehenge; an ancient Laozi manuscript; Magna Carta; a note by Einstein; Toni Morrison's diaries; an electronic signature; a tattoo of a friend's handwriting; and AI-generated script. This course will investigate the history of handwriting, focusing on the importance of the technology, on its recognition through the human eye and computational tools, and its countercultural aspects. Considering the training and physical efforts of scribes, can we program robots to handwrite? Could you wield a quill-pen and write like a medieval monk? Can we tell a person's criminal tendencies by their script? Can AI ever learn to read complex historical documents? These are just some of the areas we'll explore on this wide-ranging course.