A Quantitative/Qualitative Approach to OCR Error Detection and Correction in Old Newspapers for Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies

The use of OCR software to convert printed characters to digital text is a fundamental tool within diachronic approaches to Corpus- assisted discourse Studies because allow researchers to expand their inter- est by making many texts available and analysable through a computer. However, OCR software are not totally accurate, and the resulting er- ror rate compromises their effectiveness. This paper proposes a mixed qualitative-quantitative approach to OCR error detection and correction in order to develop a methodology for compiling historical corpora. The proposed approach consists of three main steps: corpus creation, OCR detection and correction, and application of the automatic rules. The rules are implemented in R using a “tidyverse” approach for a better reproducibility of the experiments.