Loadingā¦
12
Showerthought: I searched a 1978 city directory for my grandma's bakery and learned her street number was wrong
I was trying to track down the old bakery my grandma ran in Cleveland back in the 70s, so I dug through a scanned 1978 city directory online and typed in her business name. Turns out the address listed there was actually a hardware store two blocks over, and the library scan had the page margins shifted so the columns didn't line up. Has anyone else run into bad OCR on old directory scans, and is there a trick to line up the columns before you trust the numbers?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
patricia_king2313h ago
Man, those old directory scans are the worst for that. What I do is pull up the page image and use the text layer just as a rough map, then read the actual pixels for the address, since the OCR copy is the part that drifts. Cross-check the number against a second source like a phone book or a newspaper ad from the same year before you trust it. Half the time the scan shift is just the page being a little crooked, so zoom in and eyeball the column lines yourself.
9