Confessions of a lazy typist: transcribing with Google docs

my Totally Terrific Text Transcription Task Tool reposted

from my online research journal

Earlier this year I discovered a a clever way of using Google Docs to recover the text of an image and transcribe it.

Take a headstone inscription you’ve photographed in a cemetery, for example.

Here is a photograph of a Way family headstone in the Parkes cemetery, in New South Wales. (They’re relatives of my husband Greg.)

First I upload the image to Google Drive. In https://drive.google.com/drive/home I click on the “+ New” button at the top left.

Then I refresh the screen so that the new file appears in the list of my files. To do this, I click on the three dots on the right of the screen. This opens the menu. I select “Open with”. I choose “Google Docs”.

The opened document has the image, with a transcription below. The transcription is editable.

I have used the same technique for newspaper notices and have even tried it on handwriting. Here is a letter my mother wrote when she was ten years old.

The transcriptions are not always perfectly accurate, but they are easy to fix by hand. They are always better than typing from scratch.

I have even tried it with wills, this one from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. The will of my 5th great grandfather goes for nearly forty pages, not a trivial transcription job. Let’s see how well the Google technique copes.

Google docs did not transcribe the will perfectly, but I’d rather edit and correct its attempt than type it up myself.

I hope other family historians find this tip useful.