Web Site performance and OCR
Firstly I think you are doing a great thing with this archive; good job!
However my experience of trying to contribute to your project in a small way and correct the plethora of errors which your very basic OCR generates in the articles I am researching has been very frustrating. Reviewing and correcting a few thousand words is taking hours when it should take maybe only an hour if the performance of the website was quicker and if the user interface for editing had been better designed. In Microsoft Word or some similar software I can see all the errors and easily correct them but the tortuous line by line interface on your website and the fact that each time you save you are taken back to the beginning of the article makes editing a real pain. Worse; during a long editing session, the performance of the website drops to a snail's pace with each character taking a long time to enter. Personally I think you should spend some money on this because however extensive the content, if you can't easily read and edit, the whole experience is frustrating. You also should look at the kind of AI that has been available for a while -to avoid your OCR making repeated errors like tbe instead of the. Its just requires some context sensitive logic and I'm certain there are solutions available. Very best of luck with it and I will persevere :) Simon
Simon Oxley
shared this idea
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ErRose Red (Erro) commented
For the love of all that is holy, please fix the tiny box, line by line interface for OCR correction. It is so clunky that it's virtually impossible to use, and for such a critical element of your setup, it is baffling that it is so user-unfriendly. When I would otherwise be willing to fix at least one thing on the page of any free-to-view article I access, as thank-you for letting me see it, I am absolutely disinclined to do so with the current setup. I've tried it twice and found it so difficult I gave up.
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Michael S
commented
I live overseas in South East Asia and the performance of the Newspaper Archive and Find My Past for any kind of image display has become unusable over the past 3 Months. Usually it wont dispIay at all but occasionally will come up after 2-3 minutes. I thought it was a temporary glitch and reported it to support but looking at the responses nobody has any interest in investigating or resolving it. I've cancelled both subscriptions.