  Handwriting is an art form that most people learn at an early age. Each
person's writing style is unique with small changes as we grow older and as our
mood changes. Here we analyse handwritten text in a culturally significant
personal diary. We compare changes in handwriting and relate this to the
sentiment of the written material and to the topic of diary entries. We
identify handwritten text from digitised images and generate a canonical form
for words using shape matching to compare how the same handwritten word appears
over a period of time. For determining the sentiment of diary entries, we use
the Hedonometer, a dictionary-based approach to scoring sentiment. We apply
these techniques to the historical diary entries of Rosamond Jacob (1888-1960),
an Irish writer and political activist whose daily diary entries report on the
major events in Ireland during the first half of the last century.
