Silent Disco: Generating an Ordered Dataset from an OCR Text File
Online
Our 'Silent Disco' workshops are based on tutorials from the Programming Historian website. This training event will follow content from the tutorial, Generating an Ordered Data Set from an OCR Text File.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)—the conversion of scanned images to machine-encoded text—has proven a godsend for historical research. This process allows texts to be searchable on one hand and more easily parsed and mined on the other. But OCR’d historical text is far from perfect. This tutorial illustrates strategies for taking raw OCR output from a scanned text, parsing it to isolate and correct essential elements of metadata, and generating an ordered data set (a python dictionary) from it. These illustrations are specific to a particular text, but the overall strategy, and some of the individual procedures, can be adapted to organize any scanned text, even if it doesn’t look like this one.
The workshop will take place via Microsoft Teams in a ‘Silent Disco’ format. Participants will work on the tutorial at their own pace. The facilitator will be available via Teams Chat to reply to any questions that arise during the workshop, and to help with installation, troubleshooting or other issues.
This is an intermediate-level workshop. You will need a basic understanding of Python and how to run Python code.
To attend this course, you will have to join the associated Microsoft Teams group. The link to join the group will be sent to attendees prior to the course start date, so please make sure to do so in advance.
This Silent Disco will be taught by Lucia Michielin.
After taking part in this event, you may decide that you need some further help in applying what you have learnt to your research. If so, you can book a Data Surgery meeting with one of our training fellows.
More details about Data Surgeries.
If you’re new to this training event format, or to CDCS training events in general, read more on what to expect from CDCS training. Here you will also find details of our cancellation and no-show policy, which applies to this event.
If you're interested in other training on digitised documents, have a look at the following:
