Improve Optical Character Recognition
The existing OCR is poor. Many words are garbled, rendering search results meaningless
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9 comments
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CF
commented
When performing OCR, it's quite remarkable how the quality of the output is driven by the fonts which the software used supports/understands. For example, I was asked to digitise a printed document for a family history society (which owned the copyright to the document). The first attempt at OCR-ing the document produced absolute rubbish. I then spent some time identifying the font (not long - at most 1 hour). The quality of the OCR output then rose to 99% ...
I have no detailed knowledge of the history of newspapers but I suspect that many used the same small set of fonts which are no longer standard today. I reckon that a newspaper historian would be able to point to documents which chart the history of newspaper fonts, and that this would allow The BNA to install the appropriate fonts into its OCR software. (Don't forget to include the bold and italic flavours as well.)
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VB
commented
While I sympathise with the difficulties there must be with digitising many old publications, there are many times when I can see no reason why the OCR text is as bad as it is. I imagine that, as with some other software, a choice is being made between speed and accuracy; too often (on the Wiltshire Times, which I have used most recently) speed has been chosen, resulting in long sections of gobbledegook. There is so much OCR text that is so bad, I don't have time to correct it - if I want to use it, I have to transcribe it from scratch. I don't do that for BNA to benefit, while paying for it!
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Anonymous
commented
I use Trove from the NLA a lot and their OCR is vastly superior to the OCR results from the BNA.
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johnjo
commented
This short example shows how bad the OCR can be!
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johnjo
commented
I am referring to recently scanned pages. The Lincs Chronicle of 1919 is almost useless. I would love to post here the text as read by OCR to illustrate this.
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johnjo
commented
Sometimes it seems that the newspapesr you are scanning are of poor quality. They do fade and get damaged, and their storage affects their survival. It must be difficult to get hold of good copies quickly, so some rescanning may have to take place in the future
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Anonymous
commented
If we could use wildcards it would get round some of these problems
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John Woolman
commented
There are some quite common misreads such as 'tbe' instead of 'the' would it be possible to do a find all and replace all search
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Anonymous
commented
I find that searching with 'EXACT' for a surname like IVIN picks up Giving and other such words this shouldn't be so with good OCR