r/MachineLearning - [R] How Machine Learning Can Help Unlock the World of Ancient Japan (by Alex Lamb)

This is a global problem, yet one of the most striking examples is the case of Japan. From 800 until 1900 CE, Japan used a writing system called Kuzushiji, which was removed from the curriculum in 1900 when the elementary school education was reformed. Currently, the overwhelming majority of Japanese speakers cannot read texts which are more than 150 years old. The volume of these texts -- comprised of over three million books in storage but only readable by a handful of specially-trained scholars -- is staggering. One library alone has digitized 20 million pages from such documents.