AI Case Study

"The Kaggle Research Competition is a machine learning focused community owned by Google, for the algorithmic identification of marks, initials, and signatures. MarineLives, a collaborative transcription project, works with primary manuscripts from the English High Court of Admiralty from 1627 to 1677. This court dealt with marine matters, such as sea disputes with ship owners or sailors on ships. Approximately six million words and full-text transcriptions were assembled over the last six years.

"We don't have a complete sample of the English or European population from the 17th century—we deal with 17th-century data," Greenstreet said. "But we do have a lot of mariners and merchants and other related trades."

The historian David Cressy had the idea that if someone could sign their name, it meant they were literate. Whereas, the use of a crude mark or initials, which was a sort of interim between a mark and a signature, was a sign that someone was less literate.

"If we can distinguish the degree of sophistication of the signature and of the mark and of the initial, then we can assemble additional knowledge," Greenstreet said. "If we can work at a much greater scale, we can assemble some pretty powerful data."

MarineLives is currently in the process of forming a charity called Chronoscopic Education, which will become the home for MarineLives and a number of other projects they run. Their aim is to create a collaborative research community.

"It depends upon us assembling a fully annotated data set," Greenstreet said. "We're aiming for about 10,000 images, which will be annotated in some shape or form, and we're still debating that annotation."

Greenstreet said the project is a bit like dragging a horse to water because historians typically have fewer computer science skills. Therefore, it is important to show historians the power of working at a larger scale in terms of the data."