medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
At 04:26 PM 4/30/2008, Chris C wrote:
> >(And it only works on typescript, not hand lettering.)
>
>actually, a good OCR program *can* be "trained" to read manuscript, providing
>only that the "lettering" is *consistent* [which most middlevil scribal
>product are].
Yes, you can train an OCR -- with Latin and Greek bookhands. But, no,
forget most handwriting. Back in 1992-93 I wrote a program to
OCR Insular... called it "Filbert" because everyone thought I was a
nut to even try. Never got it beyond 75% accuracy and this
handwriting problem has never been solved. .. though some members of
IGS are still working on it. All you have to do is squish letters
together or draw a line through the writing and it's unreadable by
OCR no matter how much training. That's why we see this type
of "writing" used as anti-spam passwords: the technique works.
To be honest, I don't think the problem will ever be solved. Too much
cummulative range of variation in most *private* hands. (Not the case
with the hands of professional scribes.) However, those facsimiles
now available on-line are a boon.
Pdf is NOT downward compatible. The one major plus of pdf is it
protects the text from added or changed wording that the author did
not put there.
The TEI also dates back to 1991-92. I know; I worked on it. One plus
for TEI is that you can create your own encoding for a text. I wrote
a publicly available utility for encoding and decoding TEI type text
encoding. Unfortunately, it will not work on a 16 or 32 bit OS
(Thank you MS for making so much downwards incompatible. Even their
new Vista is not fully compatible with their own XP Word.)
>the training feature is there to enable the softwhere to recognize unusual
>fonts or oddities like the [consistently] broken type which one sees
>ocassionally in older books, but basically any consistent "little dots on
>paper" can be recognized, providing the user is possessed of near-Jobean
>patience.
Hmm, why not the patience of Griselda? :-)
>c
rochelle
**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html
|