This envelope had the air of an official record of some period long past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more substantial materials than at present.
Normal character-recognition software doesn't work well on the wide variety of handwriting found in the archive, so machine learning is being used to recognise word shapes and match them between documents.
Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.
I steal someone's notebook because they're incapacitated and I just start journaling; I just start writing like in seven-year-old handwriting — it's ridiculous and that's how my night goes the first night.