Optical character recognition helps us find information in historical newspaper databases, but it doesn’t always work perfectly. This video shows what to watch out for, and what you can do to find more accurate information on your topic. The examples used in this video tutorial are from the 17th and 18th Century Burney Newspapers Collection.
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Video timeline:
0:00 Intro
0:57 What is OCR?
1:23 OCR shortcomings and examples
3:24 Why OCR fails
4:36 OCR hacks
4:43 Synonyms
5:18 Browse adjacent issues of a publication
6:48 Follow citation trails
7:15 Find a specific periodical
8:27 Summary