An Annotated Bibliography in Pen Computing and Handwriting Character Recognition

This is a posting of a bibliography on on-line character recognition (a.k.a. dynamic character recognition, a.k.a. pen computing). I am posting it as a service to those with interest in the field. It may also be of special interest to anyone investigating any of the recent flood of patents in the areas of digitizer tablets, character recognition, and tablet-PC GUIs. I have physical copies of most of the papers cited here.

• This compilation is copyright © Jean Renard Ward, 1992, 1996, 2003, 2005, 2008.
• Permission is hereby given to link to this list, or to cite it provided that notice of this copyright is given, that the URL of this link is included, and also that you use my correct full name "Jean Renard Ward" in any such reference or link.
• Permission is hereby given to reproduce any diagrams or photographs in this collection for any purpose, including confidential reports, provided that accompanying text clearly makes reference to the URL for this page, along with the statement:
  "Source: Annotated Bibilography in Pen Computing and Handwriting Recognition by Jean Renard Ward".

The bibliography is broken up into several web pages, for convenience in printing:

When was Pen Computing invented?

Check this out: Notes on the "unknown" history of Pen Computing (from a talk given to the Boston Computer Society in 1992)

Who invented Pen Computing?

You may have read something somewhere that indicated some organization like

... had invented pen computing / tablet computing. After skimming through some of the references above, you might start to think those claims could be slightly exaggerated.

Note: I find the very early references to technology interesting. For example,

• Handwriting recognition by a machine in real time, with a user writing with a stylus, goes back to before World War I:
  • United States Patent 1,117,184, November 17, 1914 [GoldbergHE14]
  • United States Patent 1,311,384, July 29, 1919 [Drew19]
• Optical character recognition (from a printed page) goes back to before the days of computers:
  • United States Patent 1,838,398, December 29, 1931 [GoldbergE31]
• Electronic Tablets were invented in the 19th century:
  • United States Patent 461,472, October 20, 1891 [Gray1891]
  • United States Patent 491,347, February 7, 1893 [Gray1893]
    (Note: Elisha Grey is best known in history as the person who may have invented the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell, but lost the patent dispute in a famous and controversial court decision)
• "Electronic ink" (the pen-computing kind, not the electronic display) is older than you think:
  • "The RAND Tablet: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication Device", 1964 [DavisMR64]
    (Note: This is the earliest published use of this term in pen-computing, AFAIK).
• Language knowledge being used in character recognition:
  • The early references to the "Viterbi" algorithm are interesting to compare with more recent inventions on glyphs and context. [Viterbi67]
• So you think your recognition software is pretty good? ... look at this.
  • Another interesting slant is the many claims of "near perfect" handwriting recognition algorithms in the earliest days of pen computing, such as [Simek67] and [Dimond57]
    (Note: At one of my pen-computing jobs in the late 1980s, we joked that Dimond had achieved 97% "perfect" handwriting recognition in 1957, and that the technology had been getting about 5% better every decade since: the trend seems to have continued unbroken, like some odd form of Moore's Law.)
    

You can find almost anything using one of the major search engines on the Internet these days. However, here are some links to other pages with talking about the history of pen computing. (Please note that links expire, so these may not all be up-to-date.)

• Images of early PenComputing products (work in progress -- I have lots more in my attic)
• Notes on the "unknown" history of Pen Computing (from a talk given to the Boston Computer Society in 1992)
• Schomaker's MIAMI group in the "Esprit" project includes a detailed taxonomy and another large set of references relating to pen computing.
• Andreas Hennig has posted another (shorter) bibliography relating to pen computing.
• Nottingham Trent University has a research group in this area.
• Gary Perlman set up an extensive on-line bibliography on human-computer interaction.
• Bill Buxton has been working on haptic user-interfaces at various institutions for a long time. You can find his most recent work at www.billbuxton.com
• The "Pen Report" has references to many of the commercial developments in one of the more recent pen-computing "crazes". It is listed as part of the AMUG Newton page, one of many user-group pages on the Web.
• There have been some original papers posted in odd places, such as this one by Scattolin Patrice.

Thank you,

Mirrors of this page can be found at:

• http://users.erols.com/rwservices/biblio.html
• http://146.115.126.210:81/biblio.html
• http://rwservices.no-ip.info:81/biblio.html

Back to homepage for Rueters-Ward / Zurück zur Heimatseite Rüters-Ward

Last edited: 16-Jun-2006