Having given up on inaccurate OCR of old, I can spend a disproportionate amount of my day in time consuming (but accurate) manual transcriptions of newspaper reports and adverts.
As an AI newbie I had never tried this before, so I thought that I would see what AI made of the following advertisement from the Lancaster Gazette (which is in the public domain).
Using a simple “Convert image to text” request produced:
Here is a clear, complete transcription of the image:
- B. B. CULLINGWORTH,
ARCHITECTURAL, MECHANICAL, LANDSCAPE,
AND PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER.
In returning thanks for the liberal patronage he has received since he came to Lancaster, begs to inform his friends and the public generally, that his new Portrait Rooms are now complete, with a fresh arrangement of light, made from a drawing of one of the first photographic houses in London, and he is now able to produce Portraits of every description, superior to any ever offered to the public in Lancaster, at the under-mentioned prices:—
1 doz. ½ doz.
Carte de Visite Portraits in two different positions, with either plain or fancy background ............... 12s. 6s.
Carte de Visite, in one position .................................................. 10s. 5s.
Views of Monuments or Tombstones, with inscription legible, suitable for Albums .... 15s. 10s.
Whole Plate Portraits, either in sitting or standing position, coloured in oil by one of the first photographic colourists ...................................................... Each
- Whole Plate, coloured ........................................ £1 15s. 0d.
- Half Plate, do. ................................................ £1 10s. 0d.
- Whole Plate, uncoloured ...................................... £0 17s. 6d.
- Half Plate, do. ................................................ £0 10s. 0d.
Copies to be had at a great reduction.
View of any building, 10s., or half-dozen ......................................... £2 0s. 0d.
Extra copies ........................................................................ 3s. 6d.
Any kind of Machinery, Carriages, Horses, Dogs, &c., taken on reasonable terms.
For Views taken at a distance exceeding two miles from Lancaster, not less than half a dozen printed.
PORTRAIT ROOMS.
OPPOSITE ST. JOHN’S CHURCH, LANCASTER.
- B. C. having several orders on hand, would be glad if parties wishful for views would give timely notice.
The transcription was impressive, even if the random emboldening was puzzling!
Refining the request to “Convert image to text formatted for printing” produced:
Here is the advert cleanly typeset for printing (A4 portrait, single column, tidy spacing while preserving the original wording and prices):
- B. B. CULLINGWORTH
ARCHITECTURAL, MECHANICAL, LANDSCAPE,
AND PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER
In returning thanks for the liberal patronage he has received since he came to Lancaster, begs to inform his friends and the public generally, that his new Portrait Rooms are now complete, with a fresh arrangement of light, made from a drawing of one of the first photographic houses in London, and he is now able to produce Portraits of every description, superior to any ever offered to the public in Lancaster, at the under-mentioned prices:
PRICE LIST
Carte de Visite Portraits
Description | 1 Dozen | ½ Dozen |
Two different positions, with either plain or fancy background | 12s. | 6s. |
One position | 10s. | 5s. |
Views
Description | 1 Dozen | ½ Dozen |
Views of Monuments or Tombstones, with inscription legible, suitable for Albums | 15s. | 10s. |
Large Portraits
Description | Price |
Whole Plate Portraits, either in sitting or standing position, coloured in oil by one of the first photographic colourists | |
Whole Plate, coloured | £1 15s. 0d. |
Half Plate, coloured | £1 10s. 0d. |
Whole Plate, uncoloured | £0 17s. 6d. |
Half Plate, uncoloured | £0 10s. 0d. |
Copies to be had at a great reduction.
Building Views
Description | Price |
View of any building, 10s., or half-dozen | £2 0s. 0d. |
Extra copies | 3s. 6d. |
Any kind of Machinery, Carriages, Horses, Dogs, &c., taken on reasonable terms.
For views taken at a distance exceeding two miles from Lancaster, not less than half a dozen printed.
PORTRAIT ROOMS
OPPOSITE ST. JOHN’S CHURCH, LANCASTER
- B. C. having several orders on hand, would be glad if parties wishful for views would give timely notice.
It looked much better onscreen than when copied and pasted into a Word document, or as shown above in this blog, the price list was in two columns.
The rewording of repeated requests produced responses of differing degrees of success or failure. Asking it to retain capitals and or columns produced results inferior to those shown above.
I also found that asking it to produce a pdf or Word document produced inferior results, more akin to OCR of old, whilst the transcription was accurate, it condensed it into one paragraph or it was curtailed.
Searching BPH for “ChatGPT” only brought up a couple of hits, one was from the Hong Kong History Research Centre https://britishphotohistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/survey-historical-photographs-of-hong-kong
which contained 'Chinese' text, so I asked ChatGPT to translate it into English, it produced what seems like a plausible translation to me given the content of their blog.
As an AI novice I would be interested in hearing from other members of their experiences and perhaps promote the sharing of successful scripts and tips.
I would be particularly interested in hearing from anyone who has experience in machine transcribing and / or translating handwritten script as I can think of a number of items in my collection where that would be of benefit.
Thank you.
Comments
For my negative captions I have this as a post-extration rule (prompt) in Datasheep which works well for our purpose -Remove line breaks and correct spelling and grammatical errors in British English. Keep the first sentence in UPPERCASE and output the remainder in sentence case. For one off OCR's , Microsoft Co-Pilot also works well. Important to note that free versions of Chat-GPT and some T+Cs mean that the AIs are are very likely to be training from the input data and also you could be infringing copyright if the original text you are using (i.e. you have copied) is not in the public domain or rights owned. JB
I use ChatGPT for both transcriptions and translations. I always ask for a verbatim transcription and there are still occasional errors. You can direct it to 'transcribe verbatim, maintaining spacing and line breaks'. This will give a better approximation of the text. The translations are quite good, better than google trnaslate or other online versions.
Thanks for the advice Roger, I'll give it a try.
I helped delevop Datasheep.com based on a specific OCR issue we had at Topfoto.co.uk - We have many thousands of negatives from press photo archives which have all corresponding caption sheets. Apart from the basic OCR , it uses AI (a ChatGPT API) rules (prompts) to extract data from the resulting OCR text into fields. This is then exported to a CSV or XLS file that can be further cleaned up and then be bulk imported into the metadata fields of the corresponding images. I gave a demo of it for the ICA when in beta version but it has moved on quite a bit since then and is ready to use live - the ICA demo is number 5 on this https://www.ica.org/resource/ai-and-archival-practice-on-line-tutor... or try it out from the datasheep url above. We have found it invaluable for our specific needs, best John
Thanks for the advice, I'll give Datasheep a try, and watch the video.
My iPad is nearly as good for that text. iPads will now now perform OCR on snipped images.
This is how the second transcription looked on screen:
Now that is a lot better than I get from either my iPad or from the online OCR that I sometimes use. I'll also try the Datsheep one. Thanks for letting us know about these things.
I have been reading a lot of 19th century French papers on photography, on a Windows 11 tablet computer. "Visual serch with (Microsoft) Bing" has proved pretty good at both OCR and translation for me.
Thanks for this Alan, I'll give it a try.