OCR for fun and profit

As part of rethinking what I might do with my Leiden paper, I picked up Alastair Thompson, Left Liberalism, the State, and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany.. I had looked at the book quickly when preparing my Tantzen paper but this time worked through it line by line. I found it amazing. I recognized that that it contained large amounts that I wanted to make notes on for future reference.

I decided that it would be worth my time to run OCR on the text. Using my i-Phone,, I scanned the introduction, the conclusion, and his chapter on Schleswig-Holstein. Working thought text this way is intense. After digitizing the text, I needed to got through and clean it up; hence a second careful reading. Lastly, I had to go through and input the footnotes, yet a third time in this process to think about arguments and sources. A lot of work that would not make sense if I were only to use the text for a few footnotes, but Thompson’s handling of local liberal politics in Schleswig-Holstein is masterful. As I continue to look into the Landvolkbewegung, this is the essential starting place for me.

Still energetic, I decided to do the same with Martin Schumacher, Land und Politic, with the added steps of running the digitized texts through Google Translate and then creating an accurate English text. Having used this procedure with several of the German texts that I used for the Tantzen paper, I found it intellectually rewarding. Comparing the mangled Google text to my close reading of the Geman text provided a deeper appreciation of Schumacher’s work.