What is the best way of preserving and sharing cultural heritage like books and pictures? During my studies I am met with the obstacle of not finding books that were needed for classes since they were old and nobody took the time or had the resources to make them available. I assume, this would be the case for many technologically underdeveloped countries and countries with few resources. Is it possible to do something about it with few resources, based on the voluntary work of a few enthusiasts? Thanks to DH at the University in Oslo I have obtained insight in the possibility of how something can be done about it.
This term paper will be created in two parts. The first part will focus on the transformation of the book from hardcover to digitalized e-book by scanning the physical copy and then using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to make the content of the book machine-readable. One of the most used programs for this type of work is ABBYY, but since it is proprietary software I will try to find a free option, possible Tesseract.
In the second part of the term paper I will walk the reader through the process of publishing the e-book and making it available for public use. This will be done by Creating an Wikisource account and learn about legal criteria and guidelines for publishing material on internet and on Wikisource. Secondly, I will make proper metadata for this book on Wikisource and make description on how it works.
The book that I will work on is a travelogue describing Norway “Letters from Norway” by Isidora Sekulich, an Serbian intellectual who traveled to Norway in 1912, and published her book in 1914. This book it is a unique view of early travels to Norway with a South-East European view. I chose the book because it does not exist in digital form yet and the copyright has expired.
I would like to write this term paper in a way that it can used as a guideline for creating other, similar projects.
Preliminary sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition (accessed 24.04.2018)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software) (accessed 24.04.2018)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLXEYtvNfP (accessed 24.04.2018)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO-1rztr4O0 (accessed 24.04.2018)
https://github.com/Bockwinkel/OCR (accessed 24.04.2018)
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
bd (April 24, 2018). OCR Project. #DHOslo. Retrieved May 16, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/nlbr