If you've ever tried to extract text from a scanned Arabic document, you already know the pain. Most OCR tooling is built English-first. Arabic adds three problems on top:
In which I reflect on the a recent trip to Chicago, overview the state of OCR for humanities data, and fangirl over Hugging Face infrastructure.
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.
When Bits Rot - with C McKean, L Talboom, A Page-Mitchell
English Edition: floppy disks, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, SSD drives - no matter what you choose to store your data on - ultimately they all decay. With my guests Callum McKean, Leontien Talboom and Adrian Page-Mitchell, we’re going to talk about what kinds of data we…
Running an optical character recognition (OCR) server might sound like it would need some powerful hardware, like a rack-mounted, water-cooled machine, or at least a nice desktop or laptop. But …read more
Today's links Georgia's voting technology blunder: It's possible for Dominion machines to suck, but not in the way that Tucker Carlson says they do. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: GWB's illegal iPod; McDonald's breakfast sandwich fanfic; Technofeudal debt; "The Everything Box"; $100m deli. Upcoming appearances: Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC,…
While it might seem quaint these days, we’ve met many makers and hackers who reach for a pen and a pad when learning something new or working their way through …read more
https://differx.blogspot.com/2026/02/ocr-carl-andre-1973-differx-2026.html #differx #carlandre #ocr