In this paper we describe a method for improving the optical character recognition (OCR) toolkit Tesseract for Finnish historical documents. First we create a model for Finnish Fraktur fonts. Second we test Tesseract with the created Fraktur model and Antiqua model on single images and combinations of images with different image preprocessing methods. Against commercial ABBYY FineReader toolkit...

This descriptive study explores deliberate barriers to user participation on the long-lived discussion site Metafilter.com. Metafilter has been in continuous operation since its founding in 1999, and at the time of this writing has around 12,000 active users. While many newer online sites appear eager to eliminate barriers to participation and recruit as many new members as possible, Metafilter...

The recognition of script in historical documents requires suitable techniques in order to identify single words. Segmentation of lines and words is a challenging task because lines are not straight and words may intersect within and between lines. For correct word segmentation, the conventional analysis of distances between text objects needs to be supplemented by a second component predicting...

In this paper we offer the first large sample evidence on the availability and usage of credit lines in U.S. public corporations and use it to re-examine the existing findings on corporate liquidity. We show that the availability of credit lines is widespread and that average undrawn credit is of the same order of magnitude as cash holdings. We test the trade-off theory of liquidity according t...

We present a software for retrieving and exploring duplicated text passages in low quality OCR historical text corpora. The system combines NCBI BLAST, a software created for comparing and aligning biological sequences, with the Solr search and indexing engine, providing a web interface to easily query and browse the clusters of duplicated texts. We demonstrate the system on a corpus of scanned...

We introduce weak morphisms of higher dimensional automata and use them to define preorder relations for HDAs, among which homeomor-phic abstraction and trace equivalent abstraction. It is shown that homeomor-phic abstraction is essentially always stronger than trace equivalent abstraction. We also define the trace language of an HDA and show that, for a large class of HDAs, it is invariant und...

In Fennoscandia, use of the natural forest as a reference for restoration and management of forest biodiversity has been widely accepted. However, limited understanding of the structure and dynamics of the natural forest has hampered the applications of the natural variability approach. This is especially the case in areas, where the natural forests have almost totally vanished. This review was...

The Cairo Genizah, discovered in the late 19th century, is a collection of handwritten historical documents containing approximately 350,000 fragments of mainly Jewish texts. The fragments are today spread out in more than seventy libraries and private collections worldwide, and there is an ongoing effort to document and catalog all extant fragments. We explore three levels of extraction of cat...

The reconstruction of the chronology of historical buildings is a tricky issue, as usually there are not historical documents that allow the assessment of construction phases, and some materials are hardly reliable for the use of dating techniques (e.g., stone). However, in the last two decades, important advances on the use of absolute dating methods on building materials have increased the po...

Current approaches in Digital .Humanities tend to ignore a central aspect of any hermeneutic introspection: the intrinsic vagueness of analyzed texts. Especially when dealing with historical documents neglecting vagueness has important implications on the interpretation of the results. In this paper we present current limitation of annotation approaches and describe a current methodology for an...