I think I qualify as a legitimate historian in this situation (I actually did buy a plane ticket to Rome last year and spent a week looking through physical tex

I think I qualify as a legitimate historian in this situation (I actually did buy a plane ticket to Rome last year and spent a week looking through physical texts at the Vatican archives). I'm thrilled by any efforts to digitize and OCR this texts and so is everyone else I know who does archival work. So I don't really know where the tone of dismissal/cynicism I'm picking up in your posts is coming from. As anyone who does archival work will tell you, one of the biggest problems is the "too much to know" issue: it's basically physically impossible to look at every relevant page of every relevant text when you only have at most a few months to a year to do your field work. So aside from the convenience aspect of being able to double check your work without flying back to Rome (or wherever), OCR also offers a qualitatively different style of research that lets you trawl for words or phrases across a very large corpus. That's super valuable for doing intellectual or cultural history, or biography.