3 ms·

"The text files were created by manually keying the full text of each work, based on millions of digital facsimile page images" !!! This is not silicon valley.

by Normati 12y ago

"The text files were created by manually keying the full text of each work, based on millions of digital facsimile page images" !!! This is not silicon valley. I wonder how they ensure accuracy. Link to the books http://ota.ox.ac.uk/tcp/ http://ota.ox.ac.uk/tcp/

th0br0 12y ago
Well, maybe they used Amazon Mechanical Turk ;)
- jbaiter 12y ago
  I know from a similar German project (http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de) and they have two independent non-German speakers transcribe the digital facsimiles to ensure that the transcriptions are as accurate as possible.
rmc 12y ago
Hundreds of gradstudents.
arocks 12y ago
I highly doubt that. One of the text [1] starts with the line: > TO THE RIGHT VVORSHIPFVLL MAISTER RObert Clarke, The mistakes look like typical OCR errors. [1]: http://tei.it.ox.ac.uk/tcp/Texts-HTML/free/A01/A01716.html http://tei.it.ox.ac.uk/tcp/Texts-HTML/free/A01/A01716.html
- philers 12y ago
  In fact, those mistakes look more like accurate transcriptions of Early Modern manuscripts - with their looser spelling rules and often idiosyncratic use of letters. It's kind of interesting that they look like the same errors as those generated by OCR. The difficulty of deciphering the text makes this huge task even more impressive!
  - coroxout 12y ago
    It's precisely those idiosyncrasies of early modern orthography which make it difficult to use an off-the-shelf OCR package, which is presumably why these are hand-transcribed instead. Perhaps there is a specialist antiquarian OCR package which can deal with long s, interchangeable u and v, non-standardised spelling, etc, but I have yet to come across one.
    - acdha 12y ago
      Have you looked at The Early Modern OCR project? My understanding is that they're working on exactly that as well as simply better tools for reviewing & retraining on a large scale: http://emop.tamu.edu/ http://emop.tamu.edu/
      - coroxout 12y ago
        No, I hadn't, and am grateful for the link - thank you!

by Normati 12y ago

th0br0 12y ago

Well, maybe they used Amazon Mechanical Turk ;)

jbaiter 12y ago
I know from a similar German project (http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de) and they have two independent non-German speakers transcribe the digital facsimiles to ensure that the transcriptions are as accurate as possible.

rmc 12y ago

Hundreds of gradstudents.

arocks 12y ago

I highly doubt that. One of the text [1] starts with the line: > TO THE RIGHT VVORSHIPFVLL MAISTER RObert Clarke, The mistakes look like typical OCR errors. [1]: http://tei.it.ox.ac.uk/tcp/Texts-HTML/free/A01/A01716.html http://tei.it.ox.ac.uk/tcp/Texts-HTML/free/A01/A01716.html

philers 12y ago
In fact, those mistakes look more like accurate transcriptions of Early Modern manuscripts - with their looser spelling rules and often idiosyncratic use of letters. It's kind of interesting that they look like the same errors as those generated by OCR. The difficulty of deciphering the text makes this huge task even more impressive!
- coroxout 12y ago
  It's precisely those idiosyncrasies of early modern orthography which make it difficult to use an off-the-shelf OCR package, which is presumably why these are hand-transcribed instead. Perhaps there is a specialist antiquarian OCR package which can deal with long s, interchangeable u and v, non-standardised spelling, etc, but I have yet to come across one.
  - acdha 12y ago
    Have you looked at The Early Modern OCR project? My understanding is that they're working on exactly that as well as simply better tools for reviewing & retraining on a large scale: http://emop.tamu.edu/ http://emop.tamu.edu/
    - coroxout 12y ago
      No, I hadn't, and am grateful for the link - thank you!