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One of the features of The British Newspaper Archive is the OCR editing tool.  This allows every user to contribute to the improvement of The Archive.  OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition– the process we use to transform millions of digitised images into searchable text.   The computer takes an image of the page and then turns each line into text.  However, as many of us have encountered, the text is not always correct and needs improvement.  As a group, we…

With Halloween approaching, we wanted to see what we could find related to the topic of hauntings in The British Newspaper Archive.Of children and hauntingsOften the origins of a haunting myth are rooted in death and loss. Sometimes the myth grows and morphs to such a point where its origin is indeterminate. Other times, the sad truth of its origin is unexpectedly revealed, as with the ‘grim discovery’ at a ‘haunted house’ in 1921, reported in The Scotsman.This…

‘He was the first man to ride into a cage of nine lions and direct their performance from the back of a Somalian stallion…’Oh, we think this will likely be our favourite newspaper headline for January.Let’s hope this poetess was an ailurophile, and that the lion tamer was a poetry lover!And we can’t help feeling that this is the sort of news story that sub-editors on newspapers dream about writing headlines for – the lucky sub-editor probably had…