The Character of Washington, by Dewitt C. Langdon, 1844

A copy of a speech by Dewitt C. Langdon in the author's own handwriting, concerning the character of President George Washington. The manuscript was found in the King Family Papers, University of Alabama Archives The contributor, Craig Lykins is a Digital Transformation Expert. While personally interested in the subject matter of the speech, I am more interested in the time it takes to transcribe the content manually, and benchmark that against how well AI can do a transcription of the same material. What lessons can we learn about the quality of the scanned images? What DPI should we use? Should we scan in color, grayscale or B&W? And more broadly, how can we scale digitization projects to unlock the hidden value in millions of pages of handwritten content worldwide?