An Evaluation of GPT-4V for Transcribing the Urban Renewal Hand-Written Collection

TL;DR

The launch of GPT-4V in November 2023 offered a breakthrough, enabling large-scale, efficient transcription and analysis of these historical urban renewal documents, creating vast handwritten records.

Abstract

Between 1960 and 1980, urban renewal transformed many cities, creating vast handwritten records. These documents posed a significant challenge for researchers due to their volume and handwritten nature. The launch of GPT-4V in November 2023 offered a breakthrough, enabling large-scale, efficient transcription and analysis of these historical urban renewal documents.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: An example of original document. Red rectangles are fields of our focus in transcription.
• Figure 2: Constrained Prompting