MiaIn which Sak Supple shares his experiments with using LLMs to transcribe 18th and 19th century playbills from the British Library - manicules, long 's' and all! 'blplaybills.org: better search results using LLMs' https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/blplaybills-org-better-search-results-using-llms
Sak's done it again! His updated interface to https://blplaybills.org is more mobile/tablet-friendly, and the different search options are clearer, plus his earlier OCR improvements. And checked that structured info for individual playbills!
Yvonne Perkins@mia Thanks for sharing this very interesting and helpful article about using AI instead of OCR to transcribe historical printed playbills.
Are there any plans to try this on transcribing newspapers? I have recently spent a few hours manually correcting newspaper articles in Trove. There is still an enormous quantity of text where the OCR results require substantial manual correction.
This echoes the observations of Dan Cohen a few days ago. He found that AI is a particularly useful tool for transcribing handwriting: https://social.dancohen.org/2025/11/25/new-issue-of-my-newsletter.html