Monthly Archives: May 2017

Automatic correction of OCR

A milestone: I have begun automatically correcting the OCR errors in the 46 volumes of Danby Pickering’s ‘Statutes At Large’, and have uploaded the improved text to Github.

Given the quantity of text I’m dealing with – the Pickering series alone amounts to over fifteen million words – correcting each volume ‘by hand’ is obviously impractical. Bulk ‘find and replace’ is an improvement, but still not fast enough to be practical.

Such repetitive tasks are grist to the digital mill. So, using this list of common OCR errors, augmented with others I’ve found, and a one line bash script, automatic improvement of the texts has commenced.

The results are obviously an improvement. Nevertheless, the texts still aren’t great. There are still many spelling errors. As I used spaces as separators, words with punctuation attached are uncorrected. The many problems arising from layout are still to be faced.

But this is an important step forward.

March and April 2017 Updates

Work on the Statutes Project in March and April 2017:

0: Numerous corrections to Pickering’s series of Statutes at Large. Latest versions to be found, as ever, on Github.

1: More tables of statutes uploaded to Github. Currently, there are tables for public acts 1716 to 1736, with just 1721 missing. This I’ll upload shortly.

2: More legislation collected, to the point that the menus are getting unweildly and I’ll have to do some reorganizing. Acts added include:
The Murder Act of 1751, giving the corpses of the hanged to the surgeons (and occasioning many a riot).
The Regency Act 1729, allowing the Queen to govern whilst George the Second went off to Hanover.
The Septennial Act, extending the life of a parliament to seven years. A quite undemocratic act, had there been any meaningful suffrage

On the to do list for May 2017: due to the demands of my PhD, I’ll be working on the insolvent debtor relief acts from 1649 to 1813 over the next month; consequently, those texts will be corrected and added.