OCR Woes

For my technical reflection, I have decided to discuss my experiences with the OCR software, simply because it was easily the most time-consuming and tedious portion of the technical aspects of this class. Since I have a Mac laptop, I used the Cisdem OCR software rather than ABBY Finereader.

The first thing I would like to say is the accuracy with which it translates the text is quite disappointing. I would estimate that at MOST 60% of the original text was transcribed to my text editor properly, and even more frustrating was that specific letters were nearly almost incorrectly written, for instance the letter “e” for the entirety of the respective pages was often incorrectly recorded as the letter “a”, and vice versa. Furthermore, spell-checking entire pages written in French was both lengthy and difficult, particularly when I could not read some of the words and could not use context clues to figure out what they were supposed to say (because I do not speak French). At a certain point I had to simply accept that my XML pages were simply going to be filled with egregious errors and a certain level of accuracy was impossible to achieve (much to the chagrin of my mild OCD, but hey it was a learning experience in patience and Zen).

Overall, I was not a fan of the OCR software. It was most likely faster than manually transcribing entire pages of the newspaper, but it was nonetheless aggravating and stressful. Rant over.