cahn | Frederick the Great discussion post 9

...I leave you guys alone for one weekend and it's time for a new Fritz post, lol!

I'm gonna reply to the previous post comments but I guess new letter-reading, etc. should go in this one :)

Frederick the Great links

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From:

selenak

Yeah, he wrote to Heinrich a lot.

Once a week when they weren‘t having one of their „not talking to you“ phases, according to biographers. The term „mutual addiction“ does come to mind. But wow, that would be an awful lot of work...

From:

mildred_of_midgard

It would. It occurred to me I could potentially be bribed into it with books from my wishlist, but right now I'm prioritizing whipping some posts for

rheinsberg into shape.

But if anyone wants to bribe me, the next item on my wishlist is a 200-page, 20-euro monograph called "Des Königs Knabe: Friedrich der Große und Antinous." If anyone wanted the remaining Heinrich letters, someone could promise to Venmo me the money after I deliver the letters and someone else could read and summarize the volume. (An obvious division of labor suggests itself here. ;) Especially since someone has already expressed willingness to commission the Wilhelmine letters, and ended up getting those and many others for free.)

From:

cahn

I'm all about book bribes :P :D Just saying, I am up for this!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Sweeet! Well, let me catch up on

rheinsberg, and then see just how time-consuming the OCR cleanup will be.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

You guuuuys...I must show off!

So last night I needed a break from assembling material for Rheinsberg posts, and since I was very tired, I thought some mindless OCR cleanup would do the trick.

Being me, I almost immediately decided to start seeing if I could solve the biggest problem in an automated way. And the biggest problem was that moving around of lines that I'd talked about. For instance, the following four lines:

souciant pas de sa perte et relevant toujours les assaillants de nouvelles
troupes, la garnison avait été forcée. Voilà cependant des circon-
stances que je ne saurais vous garantir, n'ayant pas de nouvelles sûres
sur cela.

were rendered by the Google API as:

souciant pas de sa perte et relevant toujours les assaillants de nouvelles
troupes, la garnison avait été forcée.
stances que je ne saurais vous garantir, n'ayant pas de nouvelles sûres
sur cela.
Voilà cependant des circon-

Which has all the right words, but half of line 2 is suddenly a new line 5. And that just seemed weird.

Well, from my reverse-engineering, it looks like Google is doing OCR as a two-step process:

1) Detecting the location of each individual word on the page.
2) Assembling the words together in text form and give them to the user.

Well, because Google is nice like that (thank you, Google!), the API actually gives you the results of both steps. In other words, I was getting, not only the garbled text printout above, but also each individual word with x and y coordinates. For example:

{ "description": "avait", "boundingPoly": { "vertices": [ { "x": 323, "y": 874 }, { "x": 368, "y": 873 }, { "x": 368, "y": 888 }, { "x": 323, "y": 889 } ] } },

{ "description": "été", "boundingPoly": { "vertices": [ { "x": 386, "y": 875 }, { "x": 412, "y": 875 }, { "x": 412, "y": 889 }, { "x": 386, "y": 889 } ] } },

{ "description": "forcée.", "boundingPoly": { "vertices": [ { "x": 429, "y": 874 }, { "x": 487, "y": 873 }, { "x": 487, "y": 889 }, { "x": 429, "y": 890 } ] } },

{ "description": "stances", "boundingPoly": { "vertices": [ { "x": 95, "y": 903 }, { "x": 160, "y": 903 }, { "x": 160, "y": 916 }, { "x": 95, "y": 916 } ] } }

And by closely inspecting the x and y coordinates of individual words that were getting returned out of order, I realized that the coordinates were correct. It was step 2, assembly of individual words, that the Google API was getting wrong.

Well, step 1 requires a team of Google-level engineers and I would never try it, but step 2 is pretty easy. You just have to sort a bunch of numbers in order to get the correct order, and then print out the words in the correct order, sans coordinates.

I did it! I now have a script that bypasses the printout from Google and constructs its own printout based on the raw coordinates.

Why is this important? Well, the detection of individual words looks good enough to me that as long as the words are in the correct order, I think I can get away with not comparing the OCR to the original text.

I still need to do manual cleanup of all 1500 or so letters, because automatically detecting things like footnotes, ends of letters, paragraph breaks , etc. is hard, and I'm going to have to go through and make judgments as to which text I'm interested in passing to the translate API and which text I want to discard.

But the key point here is that I can put all this in one file and eyeball it, and I do not have to open 1500 image files and compare them side-by-side to make sure the text is in the right place. If the first 5 or so letters I've tried this on are indicative, that is a solved problem.

Being able to scan through one long file and reformat things using macros is going to be a million times faster than opening 1500 images and moving my eyeballs back and forth as I try to make sure the OCR text matches the scanned text.

It's still going to be a little while before I can deliver (especially because of my backlog of

rheinsberg posts and also some new posts I want to make, omg), but at least now I'm thinking days instead of weeks.

Um, if all this goes well and I'm able to deliver these OCRed-plus-translated letters, I'm still going to request the Antinous book. :P I think I'll have earned it.

From:

selenak

I'm slain with admiration, or, to put it in a rococo way, I tremble! (At all the Katte posts anew, too.)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I must report my failures as well. I was holding off on replying to today's comments because I was heads-down on the Heinrich correspondence manual cleanup and I was Going! To! Finish! today and get you guys the letters! A few minutes ago, I finished the manual cleanup, completely forgot my mental note to back up the file (you see where this is going), ran the script for the next step, the script deleted the file, and I lost 3 days of time-consuming work.

*weep*

Why I wasn't backing up the file every HOUR or at least every day, I do not know. But I definitely meant to back it up as soon as I was done with the three days of cleanup.

It will hopefully take a little less time to redo than it did in the first place, since I did make improvements to the process as I went along, to speed things up, but depending on my mood, I may continue to be behind on comments for a bit, while I beat this thing into submission.

I was SO! CLOSE!

From:

cahn

Oh no! :( I'm sorry, backup shenanigans are THE MOST FRUSTRATING thing!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

:( It's my own fault.

If only I had a monkey I could blame. ~~Crackfic where Mimi was framed.~~

Have made good progress on recouping our losses; have backed up; will continue tomorrow.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Okay, I'm calling it a night. Translation is done; I found 3 truncated letters that I will fix manually in the morning; then if I don't find any more bugs, I will upload it and you can tell me about all the bugs you find. ;)

More or less caught up on post 9 comments, so tomorrow after finishing Heinrich, the plan is to catch up on post 10, selenak's no doubt awesome fic, Rheinsberg posts, and any new comments that come in while I'm asleep! This order of events subject to being interrupted by any incoming comments with the word "Katte" in the subject. :P