Att designa ett hjälpmedel för släktforskare att använda vid läsning av gamla handskrivna dokument

Sammanfattning: Reading old handwritten documents can be a real challenge for genealogists, especially as some documents in Sweden are written in the old German alphabet that is not used today. Much research has been done on how to enable computers to read old handwritten documents, but computers have so far not reached the level of reading that expert humans have. The focus seems to be on the computers reading the document with or without the help of human experts, with the aim of making the documents available in easily read form. I have, however, not found any research on how computers can help non-expert humans trying to read handwritten documents. In this project I have focused especially on beginning genealogists as reading gets easier with practice, and you need the help more in the beginning.By conducting interviews and observations with genealogists I established that reading is an issue and that there are many factors involved that make it difficult to read. Among the factors that make it difficult to read are handwriting, foreign alphabet, unknown words and old-fashioned spelling. I designed hi-fi prototypes that combine elements of online crossword-lexicons, encyclopedias and a visualization of the word in the German alphabet. After testing these on genealogists I could conclude that the prototypes made it possible for test subjects to identify words that they could not otherwise read. Seeing suggestions of words in the same alphabet as the source word makes it easier to identify the correct word. The prototypes and test texts contained a very limited amount of words and further research is needed concerning how to order and choose among word matches in a large lexicon to facilitate finding the correct word.