1. TypeWright was created thanks to a grant to Miami University by the Mellon Foundation. It was built by Performant Software.  In creating TypeWright, we have followed the lead of the Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program (Rose Holley, “Many Hands Make Light Work: Public Collaborative OCR Correction in Australian Historic Newspapers,”  National Library of Australia [March 2009]). close

2. Martin Mueller defines “curation” as making it possible for all texts “to be good enough and [to be able to] play nicely with each other”. Professor Mueller also offers a more formal definition, quoting Philip Lord: “the activity of managing and promoting the use of data from its point of creation, to ensure it is fit for contemporary purpose, and available for discovery and re-use” (Philip Lord, Alison Macdonald, Liz Lyon, David Giaretta, From Data Deluge to Data Curation, 2004). We want to ultimately be able to search across vast numbers of textual archives, and so they must be encoded in similar ways. close

3. OCR, optical character recognition programs, have difficulty reading pre-modern type because of line unevenness, ligatures, and long 's.' Type-founding and setting practices are modernized from 1820-1850. One can see the process very clearly in  Google searches. close