Loose, falling characters and sentences: The persistence of the OCR problem in digital repository E-Books

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Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2015, Pages 59-91

  Kichuk, Diana ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84961291743     PISSN: 15312542     EISSN: 15307131     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/pla.2015.0005     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 44-50.
2. Diana Kichuk applies remediation to electronic resources in her article "Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO)," Literary and Linguistic Computing 22, 3 (2007): 297-300.
3. Geoffrey Nunberg, "The Places of Books in the Age of Electronic Reproduction," Representations 42 (Spring 1993): 2.
4. Rose Holley, Many Hands Make Light Work: Public Collaborative OCR Text Correction in Australian Historic Newspapers (National Library of Australia, March 2009), accessed August 9, 2013, http://www.nla.gov.au/content/many-hands-make-light-work-publiccollaborative- ocr-text-correction-in-australian-historic.
5. See Robert Darnton, "A Library Without Walls," New York Review of Books, NYR Blog (October 4, 2010), accessed July 17, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/ oct/04/library-without-walls/. Darnton proposed a National Digital Library in this seminal piece. He was instrumental in the founding of Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), launched in 2013 with the overwhelming support and cooperation of library and other culture communities in the United States.
6. Sigfrid H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1961), 28.
7. Project Gutenberg, The Project Gutenberg License (2012), accessed April 26, 2013, http:// www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Project_Gutenberg_License.
8. Oxford University Press, Oxford Dictionaries, accessed May 31, 2013, http:// oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/e--book?q=e-book.
9. Paul Conway, "Digital Transformations and the Archival Nature of Surrogates," Archival Science (online version: April 20, 2014).
10. (SI) Failed, The Problem with Being Born Again Is (n.d.), Internet Archive (IA) edition, accessed May 31, 2013, http://archive.org/details/TheProblemWithBeingBornAgainIs
11. Cantorion Sheet Music Collection (n.d.), Internet Archive edition, accessed May 31, 2013, http://archive.org/details/Cantorion_sheet_music_collection.
12. See April 14, 2011, review by "beeb" in record for Cantorion Sheet Music Collection.
13. The Google Books preview version of Peter Shillingsburg's From Gutenberg to Google, cited later in this paper, is a good example. Chapter 1 launches immediately after the image of the cover page. The front matter and the Introduction, pp. 1-10, are missing. It does not observe the gap, although it notes page gaps elsewhere in the preview. Accessed May 31, 2013, http://books.google.ca/ books?id=rd57F8IjyF0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false.
14. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto, "The Electronic Book," in The Oxford Companion to the Book, ed. Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 271-84, reprinted with permission in the Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2010, accessed August 3, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487041872045751021104263 33220.html?mod=googlenews_wsj.
15. E. G. Lutz, What to Draw and How to Draw It (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913), IA edition, accessed August 5, 2014, https://archive.org/details/whattodrawhowtod00lutz.
16. E. G. Lutz, What to Draw and How to Draw It (1913), Kindle edition, accessed August 5, 2014, http://www.amazon.com/What-draw-Edwin-George-Lutz/dp/1179652533 [follow Look Inside link].
17. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (n.d.), Project Gutenberg edition, accessed August 3, 2013, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342.
18. Austen, Pride and Prejudice (n.d.), IA edition, accessed August 1, 2014, https://archive.org/ details/prideandprejudic01342gut.
19. About the Internet Archive, IA, accessed April 26, 2013, http://archive.org/about/.
20. Project Gutenberg, The Project Gutenberg License.
21. Michael Hart, "The History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg," 1992, Project Gutenberg, accessed April 26, 2013, http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_History_and_ Philosophy_of_Project_Gutenberg_by_Michael_Hart.
22. Ylva Berglund, Alan Morrison, Rowan Wilson, and Martin Wynne, An Investigation into Free Ebooks, Joint Information Systems (Jisc) E-Books Working Group, March 2004, accessed April 26, 2013, http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/documents/ebooks/report/FreeEbooks.html.
23. DPLA, The Digital Public Library of America (n.d.), April 26, 2013, http://dp.la/info/wpcontent/ uploads/2011/08/DPLA_PressKit_About-the-Digital-Public-Library-of-America_ version-w-fact-box1.pdf.
24. Search strategy: http://dp.la/search?q=alice%27s+adventures+in+wonderland.
25. Center for Research Libraries (CRL), Global Resources Network, Certification Report on the HathiTrust Digital Repository, March 2011, accessed August 11, 2014, http://www. crl.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/CRL%20HathiTrust%202011.pdf.
26. CRL, Global Resources Network, TRAC and TDR Checklists (2007), accessed August 12, 2014, http://www.crl.edu/archiving-preservation/digital-archives/metrics-assessing-and- certifying-0.
27. Research Libraries Group (RLG), Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities, An RLG-OCLC [Online Computer Library Center] Report (2002), accessed August 11, 2014, http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/activities/trustedrep/repositories. pdf?urlm=161690.
28. CRL, Global Resources Network, Certification Report on the HathiTrust Digital Repository.
29. HathiTrust Digital Library, HathiTrust Trustworthy Repository Audit and Certification (TRAC), accessed August 11, 2014, http://www.hathitrust.org/trac.
30. CRL, Global Resources Network, TRAC and TDR Checklists.
31. Paul Conway, "Measuring Content Quality in a Preservation Repository: HathiTrust and Large-Scale Book Digitization," Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, iPres 2010, September 19-24, 2010, Vienna, Austria, 95-102, accessed August 11, 2014, http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/85227/C06%20 Conway%20Measuring%20Content%20Quality%20iPres%202010.pdf?sequence=1.
32. CRL, Global Resources Network, Certification and Assessment, accessed August 13, 2014, http://www.crl.edu/archiving-preservation/digital-archives/certification-and- assessment-digital-repositories.
33. Conway, "Measuring Content Quality in a Preservation Repository."
34. HathiTrust, Validating Quality in Large-Scale Digitization, accessed August 13, 2014, http://hathitrust-quality.projects.si.umich.edu/index.htm.
35. Conway, "Measuring Content Quality in a Preservation Repository".
36. University of Michigan, Model of Digitization Error, accessed August 13, 2014, http://hathitrust-quality.projects. si.umich.edu/images/ModelofDigitizationError2012.jpg.
37. I consulted a broad range of resources to derive this generalized schematic of e-book production, including digitization project guides, blogs, and FAQs. The following are a selection of prominent sources: tutorial created by Anne R. Kenney and Oya Rieger at Cornell University: "Moving Theory into Practice: Digital Imaging Tutorial," http:// www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/tutorial/index.html.
38. Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (2009), Digitization Activities: Project Planning and Management Outline, http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/DigActivities-FADGI-v1-20091104. pdf.
39. Council on Library and Information Resources Reports series, http://www.clir.org/ pubs/reports.
40. California Digital Library (CDL), CDL Digital File Format Recommendations: Master Production Files (CDL DFFR), August 2011, http://www.cdlib.org/gateways/docs/ cdl_dffr.pdf.
41. digital repository FAQ pages, for example, PG's Volunteer FAQ, http://www. gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Volunteers%27_FAQ.
42. an e-book production manual, James Simmons, E-Book Enlightenment (Amsterdam: Floss Manuals, 2010), http:// en.flossmanuals.net/_booki/e-book-enlightenment/e-book-enlightenment.pdf.
43. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), DFG Practical Guidelines on Digitisation (Bonn, Ger.: DFG, 2013), accessed July 24, 2014, http://www.dfg.de/formulare/12_151/12_151_ en.pdf.
44. Susanne Haaf, Frank Wiegand, and Alexander Geyken, "Measuring the Correctness of Double-Keying: Error Classification and Quality Control in a Large Corpus of TEIAnnotated Historical Text," in Fotis Jannidis, Malte Rehbein, and Laurent Romary, eds., Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative [TEI], Selected Papers from the 2011 TEI Conference 4 (March 2013), accessed July 28, 2014, http://jtei.revues.org/739.
45. Rose Holley, "How Good Can It Get? Analysing and Improving OCR Accuracy in Large Scale Historic Newspaper Digitisation Programs," D-Lib Magazine 15, 3/4 (March/April 2009), accessed May 31, 2013, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march09/holley/03holley.html.
46. "5.0 Best Practices for Optical Character Recognition," last modified December 15, 2010, accessed April 5, 2013, http://www.library.illinois.edu/dcc/bestpractices/chapter_05_ocr.html.
47. Andrew Kae, Gary Huang, Carl Doersch, and Erik Learned-Miller, "Improving State-ofthe- Art OCR Through High-Precision Document-Specific Modeling," in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2010, San Francisco, June 13-18, 2010, accessed September 27, 2013, http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/papers/ kae_cvpr_10.pdf.
48. Peter L. Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 18.
49. Cantorion Sheet Music Collection (n.d.). Select "Full Text" format of any page.
50. Padraic Colum, The Forge in the Forest (New York: Macmillan, 1925), HathiTrust edition, accessed April 26, 2013, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000743736.
51. Project Gutenberg, The Project Gutenberg License.
52. The Universal Digital Library [UDL]: Million Book Collection, accessed August 8, 2014, http:// www.ulib.org/index.html.
53. Progress Report is dated November 2007 (http://www.ulib.org/ULIBProgressReport.htm).
54. Universal Library, IA, https://archive.org/ details/universallibrary.
55. Esmé Wingfield Stratford, Churchill The Making of a Here [sic] (1942), (n.d.), IA edition, accessed April 29, 2013, http://archive.org/details/ChurchillTheMakingOfAHere.
56. Esmé Wingfield-Stratford, Churchill: The Making of a Hero (London: Victor Gollancz, 1942), accessed April 29, 2013, http://books.google.ca/books/ about/Churchill.html?id=kFhnAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y.
57. The image file was viewable as a compiled e-book when the book was first accessed in April 2013. IA has since disassembled it into a file stack. A metadata note indicates the title is under "review" by the Million Book Project.
58. See the Million Book Project collection in the IA, https://archive.org/details/millionbooks.
59. Christoph Albers, "Crowd Sourcing," News from IFLA [International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions], July 16, 2012, accessed August 29, 2013, http://www.ifla. org/news/crowd-sourcing.
60. Chuttur M. Yasser, "An Analysis of Problems in Metadata Records," Journal of Library Metadata 11, 2 (2011): 52.
61. Sarah Currier, Jane Barton, Rónán O'Beirne, and Ben Ryan, "Quality Assurance for Digital Learning Object Repositories: Issues for the Metadata Creation Process," Research in Learning Technology 12, 1 (2004), 1-20.
62. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1, accessed July 30, 2014, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
63. Mitchell Smith, The Art of Caricaturing (Chicago: Frederick J. Drake, 1941), IA edition, accessed April 26, 2013, https://archive.org/details/artofcaricaturin006061mbp.
64. HathiTrust Digital Library, Bibliographic Metadata Correction Policy, accessed August 11, 2014, http://www.hathitrust.org/bib_metadata_correction.
65. Katrina Fenlon, Timothy Cole, Myung-Ja Han, Craig Willis, and Colleen Fallaw, Rethinking HathiTrust Metadata to Support Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis, poster presented at Digital Humanities 2014, Lausanne, Switz., July 7-12, 2014, accessed August 11, 2014, http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Poster-438.xml.
66. Geoffrey Nunberg, "Google Books: The Metadata Mess," in Google Book Settlement Conference, University of California, Berkeley, August 28, 2009, accessed April 5, 2013, http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/GBook/GoogBookMetadataSh.pdf.
67. Geoffrey Nunberg, "Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck," Language Log, August 29, 2009, accessed April 5, 2013, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701.
68. Matthew Reisz, "Catalog of Errors," Inside Higher Ed, December 8, 2011, accessed April 5, 2013, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/08/scholar-continues-find- flawed-metadata-google-books.
69. James Terry White, ed., The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: J. T. White, 1898), Google Books edition, accessed April 29, 2013, http://books.google.ca/books ?id=jPApAQAAMAAJ&q=greta+garbo&dq=greta+garbo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=9b9-UfvhCNO LqQHt1oCgBw&ved=0CDAQ6AEwADgK.
70. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Illustrated ePub (1889) (n.d.), IA edition, accessed April 26, 2013, http://www.archive.org/details/ AConnecticutYankeeIllustratedEpub.
71. While the reward of association with a contributed e-book or "favored volunteer" designation may exercise some quality control, IA Community Text volunteers remain anonymous, making accountability difficult. While volunteers must register for an IA Virtual Library Card using a valid e-mail address, the public knows them only through aliases or "screen" names to preserve anonymity.
72. Roger Chartier, "Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Text," Critical Inquiry 31, 1 (2004): 133-41.
73. (SI) Failed, The Problem with Being Born Again Is
74. Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google, 20
75. Wolfgang Emmerich, "Distributed System Principles," in Distributed Systems 98/99 (lecture notes, Department of Computer Science, University College London, 1997), accessed April 26, 2013, http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/ucacwxe/lectures/ds98-99/dsee3.pdf.
76. Daniel Oelke, "Overview of Distributed Computing," in Cosm Phase I, Mithral Communications & Design (1995-2012), accessed April 26, 2013, http://www.mithral. com/projects/cosm/ch-02.html.
77. Tim Worstall, "Why Are E-Books Riddled with Typos?" Technology, October 27, 2012, accessed April 5, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/10/27/why- are-e-books-riddled-with-typos/.
78. Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google, 51.
79. Chartier, "Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Text," 147.
80. IA hosts several versions of Alice in Wonderland. If download statistics are any indication, then readers have voted overwhelmingly for quality by downloading IA's ingested version from PG, proofread by the Distributed Proofreaders project, much more frequently than other versions, including IA's own raw OCR text file. https://archive. org/search.php?query=alice%27s%20adventures%20in%20wonderland%20AND%20 mediatype%3Atexts, accessed July 23, 2014.
81. Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google, 2.
82. "eMOP Project Receives Funding from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation," Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC), September 28, 2012, accessed July 19, 2013, http://idhmc.tamu.edu/blog/2012/09/28/emop-project-to-be-funded-by- andrew-w-mellon-foundation/.
83. Berglund, Morrison, Wilson, and Wynne, An Investigation into Free Ebooks.
84. "Potential Content," [Wiki] DPLA, April 5, 2012, accessed 26 April 2013, http://cyber.law. harvard.edu/dpla/Potential_Content.
85. For example, Paul Conway includes only sketchy details regarding full-text errors in his article "Measuring Content Quality in a Preservation Repository: HathiTrust and Large- Scale Book Digitization," cited earlier.