Have had a mixed week of the proverbial highs and lows, the presentation went well in Digital History I thought. Was basically about searching the British Library's newspaper database and the problems I've had. More of what Tim has mentioned previously with bad OCR resulting in random or wrong articles coming up and the lack of coverage in the provincial newspapers and how to try and get around it (see below for slides).
Also had a major panic in the dissertation in that some of the statistics I was going to use may prove to be wrong! Will speak to my supervisor tomorrow but I may have misinterpreted either the original book I found or the new one, I'm not sure. Stay tuned on twitter etc for more breaking news (e.g. lots of blanked out swear words).
And I did a presentation in film where I cheated and got the seminar to split into two groups and come up with some answers ... ha! It worked surprisingly well, although I did do a lot of the background reading anyway and began thinking my whole approach was wrong just before I was due to give it. Must have been nervous despite having done that kind of thing before, but it all worked out fine in the end.
Sounds like you had a jam-packed week! And that sounds terrible about your dissertation. Hope you got that sorted out.
ReplyDeleteAbout the OCR technique - is there a way to overcome the errors in that? There could be a manual way to do it but it would be time consuming. Are there any other ways? If there is, I think it would be really handy for historians.