From Page to Pixel—Digitization, OCR, and Making Texts into Data

Where does digital text come from? Go behind the scenes of digitization, from the handling of physical materials to the computational work of turning scanned images into searchable text. We'll look at how projects like Google Books and HathiTrust shaped what's available to researchers, then work hands-on with optical character recognition (OCR). You'll leave knowing what OCR errors look like, how to judge whether a source is clean enough to analyze, and why the origins of digital text matter.