Where Old, Unreadable Documents Go to Be Understood
Found on Atlas Obscura on Sunday, 11 February 2018
Watson’s company, Transcription Services, has a rare specialty—transcribing historical documents that stump average readers.
Since she first started specializing in old documents, Watson has expanded beyond things written in English. She now has a stable of collaborators who can tackle manuscripts in Latin, German, Spanish, and more. She can only remember two instances that left her and her colleagues stumped. One was a Tibetan manuscript, and she couldn’t find anyone who knew the alphabet. The other was in such bad shape that she had to admit defeat.
Hundreds of years after the documents were written, someone is still able to decipher them and reveal what the person in the past wrote down on. Good luck trying the same with your Word document in 10 or 20 years; or most other documents stored on your computer.