The article makes it sound like Ms Watson has a totally unique and unusual skill but there is actually a whole field of study around interpreting old handwritten texts (Paleography).
Indeed, a friend of mine worked at a small college during the school year, but every summer, she had a grant to sit in a library and transcribe old European texts from microfilms. The project was just to take a huge pile of texts and get the first several lines of each one into a searchable database. Full transcription was a hoped-for future goal.
Anyone who'd like to try their hand (eye?) at very similar work, but in a supportive, fail-safe setting, Zooniverse has several transcription projects:
* Letters by Dutch and Flemish artists from the 1500s [1]
* Hebrew and Arabic scripts from the 10th Century [2]
* Letters from Shakespeare's contemporaries [3]
* Hand-written notes by modern artists from the Tate ("Anno-Tate") [4]
* Letters between anti-slavery advocates of the 19C [5]
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 43.4 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeography
* Letters by Dutch and Flemish artists from the 1500s [1]
* Hebrew and Arabic scripts from the 10th Century [2]
* Letters from Shakespeare's contemporaries [3]
* Hand-written notes by modern artists from the Tate ("Anno-Tate") [4]
* Letters between anti-slavery advocates of the 19C [5]
[1] https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/vincent-/parochial-archi...
[2] https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/judaicadh/scribes-of-the...
[3] https://www.shakespearesworld.org/#!/about
[4] https://anno.tate.org.uk/#!/about
[5]https://www.antislaverymanuscripts.org/