The document explains optical character recognition (OCR), its applications in textual analysis, research projects, and accessibility compliance. It covers the methods and tools available for performing OCR, such as Adobe Acrobat Pro, Google Drive, and Tesseract, detailing their capabilities and limitations. Additionally, it includes information about an organization's scholarship initiatives and candidate interviews.

1. OCR: the What, Why, and How
Mackenzie Brooks, Metadata Librarian
Alston Cobourn, Digital Scholarship Librarian

2. What is Optical Character Recognition?
Wikipedia says:
the mechanical or electronic conversion of
scanned or photographed images of typewritten
or printed text into machine-encoded/computer-
readable text.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition

4. The Second Province of Sigma
Chi, embracing the chapters at the
University of Virginia, Uampden-
Sidney, Roanoke, Randolph-Macon,
University of North Carolina and
Washington and Lec.held its annual
convention here on Thursday night
aud Friday. The delegates arrived
on the evening trains on Thursday
mid went immediately to the Lex-
ington, where they put tip.

5. Why
● Textual analysis
● Your research, student work, DH projects
● ADA compliance

6. With the full text you can…
● All PDFs are not created equal
○ Searchable
○ Extract text
● Textual analysis
○ Voyant Tools
○ TEI

7. Accessibility
● Screen reading
● Kurtzweil
● Indexable
● General readability

8. How?
● Multiple tools, multiple methods
● Reads the text and tries to assign values to the
characters it sees
● Matrix matching vs. feature extraction
● Character vs. whole word recognition
● Matches from internal lexicon/dictionary
● Language options available

9. Complications
● Fonts, formatting, line breaks, columns,
italics etc.
● Thin paper, writing on back of page
● Stray marks, printing errors, margin notes,
footnotes
● Year of language

10. Recommendations
● High resolution
● Binarization
● Deskewing
● Orientation
● Crop out extraneous marks

11. What tools can I use?
Adobe Acrobat Pro
Google Drive
Tesseract

12. Adobe Acrobat Pro
● Via the Stable
● Over 40 languages (not just Latin
characters)
● Automatically preprocesses the image
● Easy to use
● Enhances PDFs
● Will work with TIFs and JPGs

13. Google Drive
● Will process PDF, GIF, JPG, and PNG
● Recommends text be 10 pixels high
● Size limit: 2MB per file or 10 pages of PDF
● Upload Settings > Convert Text from
Uploaded PDFs and Image Files

14. Project Naptha
http://projectnaptha.com/
● automatically applies state-of-the-art computer
vision algorithms on every image you see while
browsing the web. The result is a seamless
and intuitive experience, where you can
highlight as well as copy and paste and even
edit and translate the text formerly trapped
within an image.

15. Tesseract
● OCR Engine
● 1985-1994 HP; 2006 Google
● Highest accuracy
● Command line or front end options
https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

16. Tesseract Frontends
● FreeOCR
○ Windows
○ PDF, TIFF, JPG
○ 11 languages
○ Ability to input common errors
○ Functions as scanning software
● Other options:
○ https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/wiki/3rdParty

17. Free OCR
SWMSFC Is Set
To Interview
New Candidates
Class Ring Orders
Now Being Taken
The SWMSFC, an autonomous
committee. constituted to raise funds
for a scholarship in memory of W&L
men who lost their lives in World
War ll, wffl interview candidates
for membership in the organization
Tuesday Oct. 11, at 7 p.m. in the
Student Union.
Adobe
SWMSFC Is Set To Interview New Candidates
Class Ring Orders Now Being Taken
The SWMSFC. an autonomous committee,
cotultiluted to raise funds lor a scholarship In
memory of W&L men who l09t their lives in
World War II, will interview candidates for
membership in the organilation Tuesday Oct.
11, at 7 p.m. in the Student. Union.
Tesseract
SWMSFC Is Set
To Interview
New Candidates
Class Ring Orders
Now Being Taken
The SWMSFC, an autonomous
committee, constituted to raise funds
for a scholarship in memory of W&L
men who lost their lives in World
War II, will interview candidates
for membership in the organization
Tuesday Oct. 11, at 7 p.m. in the
Student Union.
Google Drive
SWMSFC Is Set To Interview New Candidates
Class Ring Orders Now Being Taken
The SWMSFC, an autonomous committee,
constituted to raise funds for a scholarship in memory
of W&L men who lost their lives in World War II, will
interview candidates for membership in the
organization Tuesday Oct. 11, at 7 p.m. in the Student
Union.

18. Contact
Mackenzie Brooks
brooksm@wlu.edu x8659
Alston Cobourn
cobourna@wlu.edu x8657
DHAT@wlu.edu