Investigations of a Dog

In my last project update I described how I used FineReader to OCR the text of Sandall’s History of 5th Lincolnshire Regiment. Since then I’ve manually proofread the text and inserted some basic XML markup. Proofing and basic tagging have given me a more detailed understanding of the text and the features in it, and I’ve been noting potential issues as I go. I’ll post more about how I’m using XML later, but this post is a more detailed description of the process of proofreading.

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Now that I’ve got all the theoretical agonising out of the way, I can actually do something about digitizing the text. This week I’m carrying out OCR and proofreading on the text of Sandall’s History of 5th Battalion the Lincolnshire Regiment. As soon as I got to work I encountered issues that I hadn’t thought of, and found that subjective decisions had to be made even earlier than I’d anticipated. This just shows that the only way to learn how to do something is to do it.

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In my New Year post, I mentioned that I’m thinking about carrying out a couple of digital history projects in connection with my First World War research. These projects are very small and should be relatively easy to carry out on my own, but there will almost certainly be challenges. Overcoming these will give me more experience of carrying out a digital history project (this is starting to sound like a job application again!), and produce useful resources. After that, I can move on to consider some more advanced issues, such as collaborating with other people, and dealing with seventeenth-century manuscripts. To make the experience even more useful, I’m trying to blog it as I go. This post is an outline of my plans so far. Now that I’ve published my plans I’ll have to carry them out!

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