Tag Archives: newspapers

TroveKleaner: a Knime workflow for correcting OCR errors

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In a nutshell:

  • I created a Knime workflow — the TroveKleaner — that uses a combination of topic modelling, string matching and other methods to correct OCR errors in large collections of texts. You can download it from the KNIME Hub.
  • It works, but does not correct all errors. It doesn’t even attempt to do so. Instead of examining every word in the text, it builds a dictionary of high-confidence errors and corrections, and uses the dictionary to make substitutions in the text.
  • It’s worth a look if you plan to perform computational analyses on a large collection of error-ridden digitised texts. It may also be of interest if you want to learn about topic modelling, string matching, ngrams, semantic similarity measures, and how all these things can be used in combination.

O-C-aarghh!

This post discusses the second in a series of Knime workflows that I plan to release for the purpose of mining newspaper texts from Trove, that most marvellous collection of historical newspapers and much more maintained by the National Library of Australia. The end-game is to release the whole process for geo-parsing and geovisualisation that I presented in this post on my other blog. But revising those workflows and making them fit for public consumption will be a big job (and not one I get paid for), so I’ll work towards it one step at a time.

Already, I have released the Trove KnewsGetter, which interfaces with the Trove API to allow you to download newspaper texts in bulk. But what do you do with 20,000 newspaper articles from Trove?

Before you even think about how to analyse this data, the first thing you will probably do is cast your eyes over it, just to see what it looks like.

Cue horror.

A typical reaction upon seeing Trove’s OCR-derived text for the first time. Continue reading TroveKleaner: a Knime workflow for correcting OCR errors →

Playing with page numbers

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When was the last time you read a newspaper? I mean an actual, physical newspaper? Can you look at your fingertips and picture them smudged with ink, or remember trying to turn and fold those large and unwieldy pages? These are fading memories for me, and are probably totally foreign to many younger people today. Like many people, I consume virtually all of my news these days via the internet or, on rare occasion, the television. As far as I am concerned, newspapers are fast becoming nothing more than historical artifacts.

And yet, newspaper articles account for the bulk of the news data that I am analysing in my PhD project. To be sure, most of these newspaper articles were also published online, and would have been consumed that way by a lot of people. But I feel I can’t ignore the fact that these articles were also produced and consumed in a physical format. Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do to account for the physical presentation of the articles. My database doesn’t include the accompanying images or captions. Nor does it record how the articles were laid out on the page, or what other content surrounded them. But the metadata provided by Factiva does include one piece of information about each article’s physical manifestation: the page number of the newspaper in which it appeared.

From the very beginning of the explorations documented on this blog, I have completely ignored the page number field in my dataset. I figured that I was analysing text, not newspapers, and in any case I couldn’t see how I would incorporate page numbers into the kind of analysis that I was planning to do. But after hearing a colleague remark that ‘article-counting studies’ like mine are often unsatisfactory precisely because they fail to account for this information, I decided to give it some more thought. Continue reading Playing with page numbers →