Digitizing 18th-Century French Literature: Comparing transcription methods for a critical edition text

摘要

We compare four methods for transcribing early printed texts. Our comparison is through a case-study of digitizing an eighteenth-century French novel for a new critical edition: the 1784 Lettres taietiennes by Josephine de Monbart. We provide a detailed error analysis of transcription by optical character recognition (OCR), non-expert humans, and expert humans and weigh each technique based on accuracy, speed, cost and the need for scholarly overhead. Our findings are relevant to 18th-century French scholars as well as the entire community of scholars working to preserve, present, and revitalize interest in literature published before the digital age.