Investigative Tools

OCR Tools

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OCR Tools

Tool License / access Best for
Tesseract Open source Bulk OCR; language packs; local control
Google Cloud Vision Commercial API Hard scans, mixed layouts
Amazon Textract Commercial API Forms and tables extraction
DocumentCloud (add-ons) Platform Hosted investigative docs with OCR pipeline

Quality checklist

  • Sample 10 random pages per scanner batch; measure character error rate subjectively.
  • Watch for column order swaps in newspapers and financial tables.
  • Store OCR version and language model in the research log.

Provenance

OCR output is machine-derived. Label uncertain readings when quoting in published analysis; prefer image snippet + transcript side-by-side for high-stakes claims.

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