Comments on: OCR improvement: helping and hindering researchers

By: Tineke Koster

Tineke Koster — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 14:40:02 +0000

Good points. We interviewed researchers on this topic. I will tell some more about this in my next post.

By: Tineke Koster

Tineke Koster — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 14:33:08 +0000

Thank you for sharing this. Your situation should be quite similar to ours, so I would like to know a little bit more.
Do you store only changes to (OCR) text? What about changes to images? Or metadata?
And when storing delta’s, is your purpose reproducibility of research results specifically, or do you have other reasons as well?

By: Laurent Brun

Laurent Brun — Sat, 23 Aug 2014 10:21:09 +0000

Oops! Right, my mistake. That’s indeed quite a different issue. In that case, I think that it might be a good idea to have some kind of fine-grained version control system, maybe something à la Wikipedia or even software like Git or CVS. There are several alternatives that are free and fairly easy to implement depending on your current system. At worst, only a handful of users will benefit from a technician’s couple of days work, but who knows what future users might want to do with the data?

By: cleocleo

cleocleo — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 14:45:46 +0000

hi. would the software deal with arabic fonts?

By: Sharon Howard

Sharon Howard — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:15:10 +0000

Our situation at Old Bailey Online is not quite like yours – we make periodic corrections to errors in the data on the site but they are generally very minor. Nonetheless, sometimes we’ve done more substantial upgrades that could have more impact. What we do is to use version numbers like those of software releases, and since about 2008 we’ve kept an archive on the site – akin to a Changelog – that outlines exactly when previous changes took place and makes a particular note of any substantial amendments. We don’t make superseded versions publicly accessible but we keep copies (on a backed up server!), and we’d supply the files if anyone needed it.

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Whats-new-archive.jsp
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Whats-new.jsp

By: Sharon Howard

Sharon Howard — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 11:58:01 +0000

I think there’s a misunderstanding here. Rekeying (ie, transcription) is being carried out precisely in order to make currently inaccurate data as faithful as possible to the original texts.

By: Laurent Brun

Laurent Brun — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 23:59:31 +0000

I am a researcher working with older texts and I wouldn’t want to have the text “corrected” or “improved” since the data has to be as faithful as possible–what appears to be a mistake or a typo to an encoder might not be one at all for a researcher and you never know what a researcher will want to do with any given text. So, no tampering would be ideal. Even better, if you encode the text in XML, it is easy to have the best of both worlds by encoding the corrections or standardized spellings together with the original unamended text.

By: Andrew Waugh

Andrew Waugh — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 22:55:49 +0000

Interesting issues, and not one I’d previously considered.

I discussed it with my wife, who is closer to academic researchers than I am, and she made the following points.

Have you asked your researchers how important this capability is to them? You could then decide whether the value justifies the cost. It may be that the researchers have taken local copies of the corpus precisely to ensure reproducibility anyway.

You could also take a snapshot of the corpus before beginning the rekeying project. This would take care of the reproducibility of past research. Current research where reproducibility was of concern could use the snapshot until the rekeying project was complete. This would avoid the cost of deltas.

By: Toke Eskildsen

Toke Eskildsen — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 11:02:10 +0000

We are not at all there yet, but we plan on storing text change deltas all the way back to the original OCR. As these will be time stamped, making it possible to specify a date in the API-request for a record should solve the problem of reproducibility.