A generation of Americans never learned cursive. So Philly historians are teaching AI to transcribe it.

The decline of formal penmanship has no doubt pained old-fashioned letter writers everywhere, but it poses a particular threat to Philadelphia historians. Those humble servants of 18th-century antiquary tasked with preserving and interpreting the private musings and public pronouncements of our quill-wielding Founding Fathers and Mothers, all put to parchment in florid and flowing cursive.

What to do, wonder the guardians of Philadelphia’s unparalleled Revolutionary roots, when more and more people can barely make out a word?

“18th-century handwriting is very hard to decipher,” said Patrick Spero, CEO of the American Philosophical Society. “On top of that is an existential threat, which is that nobody is learning cursive anymore.”

Not nobody.

Once standardized instruction, cursive diminished at the end of the last century. By 2010, its looping, longhand elegance had been all but erased from many schools. It’s making a comeback of late, thanks partly to a bill passed late last month in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives that would once again require students learn cursive. The bill moves onto the state Senate. (Similar legislation failed in 2023.)

As of 2025, two dozen states require cursive instruction in public schools.

Still, it is hardly the choix de communication of the smartphone generation.

“Within a generation, we will be teaching handwriting and legibility the way we teach a foreign language,” said Bayard Miller, associate director of digital initiatives and technology at APS.

It’s a problem that APS, founded in Old City in 1743 by Ben Franklin, and the oldest learned society in America, is now tackling through a highly accurate AI tool it has developed. Combining freely available software and a custom-made transcription model — built on a single desktop gaming computer — it has released one of the largest troves of 18th-century transcription training materials in English.

And APS is just getting started. With tens of thousands of more pages slated for transcription and posting, the society is planning on soon making its new tool available for any other institutions that want it.

“It’s a game changer for the future of historical research,” Spero said.

The effort comes as part of the “The Revolutionary City: A Portal to the Nation’s Founding.” The jointly launched interactive digital platform features over 50,000 Revolutionary-era pages plucked from the curated collections of five of Philly’s premier historical institutions. Everything from early drafts of the Declaration of Independence to diaries and letters of Colonial-era women, Indigenous leaders, enslaved and free Africans, and everyday Philadelphians.

A decade in the making, the portal is designed as a legacy project for America’s 250th birthday in 2026, also known as the Semiquincentennial. More than just a website, and with videos, blogs, and multimedia exhibits, the archive aims to bring alive those fiery days of rebellion.

“The portal is an expansive window into the past,” said Christopher Levenick of the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial, which helped pay for the project. “It speaks, it questions, it provokes, and it surprises.”

But first, the folks at APS, which houses over 14 million manuscripts, including Franklin’s papers and Lewis and Clark’s journals, had to figure out how to make it readable.

Computer technology decoding images of printed text has been a solved problem for decades, said David Nelson, digital scholarship programmer at APS. We use it whenever we copy text from an image on our phone or scan our passports at the airport, he said.

Transcribing cursive is a different challenge.

“Handwriting has always been considered a problem because handwriting is so unique to each person,” Nelson said. “It’s only in the last five years that we could start getting computers to recognize handwriting as well.”

Larger European institutions, like the Swedish National Archives and the British Library, have had success. And the AI-powered Transkribus offers a freemium model (though its model is not shared).

Software that helps transcribe handwritten documents relies on computers that have learned to recognize and reproduce patterns, Nelson said. Unable to read like humans, they encode patterns as probabilities: Say, the looping slopes of a cursive “M.” Or the snaking shapes of a cursive “S.”

To teach a computer to recognize handwriting, you need high-quality samples. Lots of them.

Starting in 2023, with a staff of six, APS put out a Paul Revere-style cry for help. Scores of cursive-crazed volunteers showed up for a series of APS-hosted “Transcribe-A-Thons.”

Not everybody was over 50, Miller said with a laugh. Cursive, like everything it seems, comes back in style.

“We had young folks,” he said. “Cursive is helping us engage with a younger generation.”

Utilizing software developed at the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, APS ran algorithms over more than 2,000 pages of unique handwritten transcriptions, building a model capable of pumping out pages far faster than any person could. Currently transcribing with about 95% accuracy, APS says, the model is expected to perform even better as the team builds it out.

So far, the APS folks have posted nearly 3,500 transcribed pages to the portal, with users needing only to toggle over the 18th-century cursive to reveal transcription. They hope to have nearly all of the 50,000-plus pages transcribed and searchable within the next two years.

“Once we get this perfected, other archives around the globe are going to be able to use this on their material,” Spero said. “It’s going to unleash an unbelievable level of access.”

Most important, they say, the new transcription model will open chapters of Philly’s rich Revolutionary history to students, researchers, and anyone else who wants a peek, said Michelle Craig McDonald, director of the library and museum at APS.

“It’s making us relevant in a way that we could not have been before,” she said.