Benjamin Price

In the archives of the Musée d’Orsay, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, and Getty Research Institute, are thousands of 19th-century letters written by prominent artists. Many contain illustrations––verbal and visual––of paintings in progress, and, in some cases, accounts of the genesis of pivotal works that now hang in museums. “Mon Cher Ami”: Reading Artists’ Letters is a semester-long pilot project to develop an effective handwriting text recognition tool for this specialized archival material. Motivated by the desire to overcome the research bottleneck caused by transcription, this project also foregrounds the important ways in which HTR tools can improve the accessibility of archival material, especially when consideration is given to the legibility of their output format for neurodivergent readers and users of text-to-speech software.