I say YES. YOU say NO....Numero Tre! Enjoy!
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Maybe he'll be able to afford some hand warmers with all those millions donated for the festivities. Wonder how much he will rollover (grift) into his personal accounts rather than spend on the day or others? Hope it is so cold he can't talk.
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Yes Wren - exactly!!!
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On a totally 'not Donald Trump' note, I thought this looked interesting.
Know how to read cursive? The National Archives wants youHelp transcribe over 200 years of historical documents.
By Laura Baisas
Posted 17 Hours Ago
The National Archives needs help from people with a special set of skills–reading cursive. The archival bureau is seeking volunteer citizen archivists to help them classify and/or transcribe more than 200 years worth of hand-written historical documents. Most of these are fro the Revolutionary War-era, known for looped and flowing penmanship.
NEWSLETTER SIGN UP
“Reading cursive is a superpower,” Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog told USA Today. “It’s not just a matter of whether you learned cursive in school, it’s how much you use cursive today.”
Isaacs coordinates over 5,000 citizen archivists that help read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects within its catalog. Volunteers can help with everything from pension records, field notes made by geographers working on the Mason-Dixon line, to immigration and Census records.
Interested volunteers can sign-up online, no application required. Reading longhand script can help, but it is not required for some of the records. Revolutionary War pension records have a “no cursive required option,” where volunteers can help tag the ones that have already been transcribed so that it is easier to find them.
Learning cursive used to be standard in classrooms across the United States, with penmanship graded. Once typewriters became common and later computers, it started to disappear. Common Core teaching standards emphasized keyboard typing by 2010. However, 14 states still require cursive to be taught in schools, regardless of how little it is used in daily life.
In 2023, the state of California passed a law that requires the teaching of “cursive or joined italics” from first through sixth grades. Reading primary source historical documents–like the ones in the National Archives–was cited as a major reason behind the law. There is also some evidence that learning cursive benefits the brain.
“More and more neuroscience research is supporting the idea that writing out letters in cursive, especially in comparison to typewriting, can activate specific neural pathways that facilitate and optimise overall learning and language development,” neuroscientist Claudia Aguirre told the BBC after the California law passed.
The research into handwriting something versus typing it shows that it is still most beneficial to write with pen and paper. However, the greatest benefits to both memory and learning new words, are just tied to writing, and not using cursive over print.
According to the National Archives, artificial intelligence (AI) is starting to be able to read cursive, but still needs human help. They have been working with FamilySearch, an AI genealogical nonprofit operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to search and access historical documents. A person is still required to do the final edit of the document due to the number of errors. AI can have difficulty with rips, tears, smudges, cross-outs, ink bleeding through the paper, older forms of letters, inventive spelling, and more.
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I learned to write and read cursive in grade school because it was required then but also can read the old copperplate cursive from years of reading documents in my genealogical research. So I signed up to be a volunteer. You have a choice of the types of documents you would like to transcribe so there is really something for everyone. You can do as little or as much as you'd like.
You can also proofread what others have transcribed and make corrections/additions where they have not transcribed correctly. The older cursive can be difficult to read and some documents vary in how light or dark the writing is so sometimes a second pair of eyes is helpful. My crutch is typing because it is not something I ever learned in school so it makes transcription slower.
I previously volunteered to transcribe the 1950 US census for Family Search and wish that in addition to the census takers skills of being able to write that they could also spell. So many of the previous census documents are difficult to locate due to misspellings of surnames and first names.
I did run across an AI interpretation of the one document I was transcribing and it was full of errors (guesstimates like you see in text messages) that needed to be edited. When we had difficulty reading copperplate cursive, we used a transparent sheet of yellow plastic and it helped highlight the low pressure areas. I have to look for mine because I think if it worked on the screens of microfiche readers, it might also work on a computer screen.
I encourage you to volunteer. I am currently working on a non-challenge of transcribing records for a nurse from the Civil War. It is her work records from the hospital where she was assigned, with 2 pages per work period, one of which is just a page with a stamp in red ink. These documents are deteriorating so they need to be transcribed before they disintegrate. The penmanship is pristine and precise cursive.
Thanks for posting this ruthbru.
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Among the humble and great alike, those who achieve success do so not because fate and circumstance are especially kind to them. Often the reverse is true. They succeed because they do not whine over their fate but take whatever has been given to them and go on to make the most of their best.
Sidney Greenberg
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Thanks to a very corrupt and political biased Supreme Court. May you reap what you sow.
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His chances of staying sober in DC are slim and none.
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Once you sell your soul, you cannot get it back.
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Why make him take the oath of office, he has no intention of honoring it?
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Beavers are smarter than Trump followers, eh?
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I nominate this as his official portrait.
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Among the humble and great alike, those who achieve success do so not because fate and circumstance are especially kind to them. Often the reverse is true. They succeed because they do not whine over their fate but take whatever has been given to them and go on to make the most of their best.
Sidney Greenberg
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Not sure if I can endure another 4 years of this…
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They are.
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