Volunteers needed to transcribe historical love letters

This Valentine's Day, the Australian War Memorial is sharing the love letters of couples during times of war.

Transcript

00:00 Writing a love letter is an age-old tradition and in wartime it kept couples together who

00:07 were separated for months. Thousands of these love stories have been donated here to the

00:12 Australian War Memorial to be digitised. This Valentine's Day they're calling for more volunteers

00:18 to help transcribe these messages remotely. I've been really enjoying reading these letters,

00:23 they are better than any fiction novel that you'll be picking up because they're human

00:27 accounts. The personal letters of Malcolm Cashan and Dorothy Williams are just some

00:32 of thousands. Their son Peter says their exchanges during time away from each other immortalises

00:38 their love. They just testify to what they had, which was pretty unique, pretty intense

00:45 and it just highlights one of the difficult periods I guess in their relationship when

00:56 they were apart but it didn't seem to dent it, it made it stronger. A new digital software

01:02 is working to digitise handwriting, something AI can't always do. By transcribing it, it

01:08 makes it accessible for a whole range of people, those with vision impairments but also all

01:14 of us that don't have a vision impairment, you can also find it through a search engine

01:18 much more easily. The love stories of Peter's parents and many others who served away at

01:24 war are now available online as well as here in person.

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