Abstract
Humanities scholars increasingly rely on digital archives for their research instead of time-consuming visits to physical archives. This shift in research method has the hidden cost of working with digitally processed historical documents: how much trust can a scholar place in noisy representations of source texts? In a series of interviews with historians about their use of digital archives, we found that scholars are aware that optical character recognition (OCR) errors may bias their results. They were, however, unable to quantify this bias or to indicate what information they would need to estimate it. This, however, would be important to assess whether the results are publishable. Based on the interviews and a literature study, we provide a classification of scholarly research tasks that gives account of their susceptibility to specific OCR-induced biases and the data required for uncertainty estimations. We conducted a use case study on a national newspaper archive with example research tasks. From this we learned what data is typically available in digital archives and how it could be used to reduce and/or assess the uncertainty in result sets. We conclude that the current knowledge situation on the users’ side as well as on the tool makers’ and data providers’ side is insufficient and needs to be improved.
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See http://lab.kbresearch.nl for examples.
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available on http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1448810.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our interviewees for their contributions, the National Library of The Netherlands for their support and the reviewers for their helpful feedback. This research is funded by the Dutch COMMIT/ program.
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Traub, M.C., van Ossenbruggen, J., Hardman, L. (2015). Impact Analysis of OCR Quality on Research Tasks in Digital Archives. In: Kapidakis, S., Mazurek, C., Werla, M. (eds) Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. TPDL 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9316. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24592-8_19
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