Working with OCR software

I was trying so hard not to digitize Brown’s Toronto Directory. I thought it would take up too much time and I really was trying to complete the linking of the other two directories to the people who had the fortune or misfortune to be represented amongst the inhabitants of "Institutions" in the 1861 census. About a month ago I succumbed. Since then I have been ensconced in yet another data collection dealing with Toronto in 1861.

First, was the compiler, W R Brown, part of the Brown family of The Globe, or was he somebody else? Originally I assumed he was part of the newspaper family, but I am beginning to wonder if my assumption was correct. Living at Idlewold in Rosedale would have meant a long trip to the office everyday. Either his knowledge of downtown Toronto or a great mixup of entries just before typesetting led to a very noticeable error on Front Street West. The south side of the street suddenly jumped from Bay to Simcoe omitting Jacques & Hays’ cabinet works and Union Station. Numbered premises began again after Simcoe with even numbers which should have been on the north side. All the entries actually existed, but the order spoiled the meaning of the word “index”.

When I first discussed indexing city directories back in November I said that optical character recoginition (OCR) was not the way to go with 19th century printed pages. A couple of weeks ago I decided to see if another attempt with some software I bought years ago would be more successful.

The pages of the directory are filed individually in my computer and each page has two columns of entries. I open each directory page in my photo-finishing/drawing program, Paint.net, where I straighten the page and crop each of the columns to individual images or files. Then I take the separate columns to the OCR program and re-crop to get rid of extraneous lines and blobs of dirt on the image. The image is then “read” by the software. The result is not a pretty sight. To get one line completely correct on a page of 60 entries is unusual. The software is exceedingly poor at distinguishing numbers like “3” and “8” and “6” and “0”. The letters “v” and “y” are almost always misinterpreted. One gets used to these little vagaries.

A new discovery for me was that the OCR software permits find-and-replace corrections. I now start off work on each page by getting rid of unwanted double and triple spaces and remove all periods or full stops—things that aren’t wanted in my database style. Other start-up operations include altering the font to a uniform 20-point Times New Roman and typing a title right on the page—usually the book page number and the street it contains. Correcting a column takes about 20 minutes. Each column is saved to an individual spreadsheet file.

Once I have a collection of 10 to 20 completed spreadsheets I take a break from OCR work and combine the spreadsheets into one large one where I arrange the data into a series of columns which will ultimately be moved to a database.

The whole process probably takes as long as copy-typing the whole book, but because there is such a variety of tasks involved, the boredom factor is reduced. Into the bargain, my aging body is subject to a lot of aches and pains, particularly in the neck and shoulders. Continuous copy-typing would send me into complete lock-down. The other advantage, a personal one, is that, once I have gone through both the OCR and spreadsheet steps, I have a much better knowledge of the street I have been looking at and the people who lived there.

Another Directory Comes to Light

Sometime in the autumn, Ancestry put a number of city directories for Canadian towns and cities online. Included amongst these is Brown's Toronto Directory for 1861-2. It proves to be a very worthwhile addition to the collection of listings of people in the Toronto area in the early 1860s period, and the closest one in time to the census.

The directories I have seen before were published by men who were not permanent Toronto residents, and they may have employed agents to do the job. (Mitchell's compiler got his own name in the directory.) It was a temptation to cut corners, or perhaps I should say numbers of pages, to reduce the cost of publication for one of a series of books covering different cities across the provinces. But George Brown was producing a directory for the city he lived in--he knew its component parts and they included suburbia. His street directory includes the streets of Yorkville and the area east of the Don River between the Lakefront and Todmorden.

We know of George Brown of The Globe, but The Globe was very much a family firm. In 1861, although over 40, George Brown was still living with his parents. His father, Peter, who had started the Toronto newspaper business with his son, was still working in the office. George's brother, Gordon, was actually editor of The Globe. W R Brown was the publisher of the Toronto Directory. Perhaps because he lived at Idlewold, a house on the Yorkville-Rosedale border, he thought it worthwhile to include the areas outside the formal city limits in his publication.

Because of its place in the alphabet, Bloor Street was the first of the Yorkville streets I have found. The south side of Bloor Street was in Toronto, the north side between the top of the Don River ravine and what we now call Avenue Road was in Yorkville. Further west, Bloor Street West continued into York Township Electoral District 3. Mitchell omitted the north side of Bloor Street from his street directory of 1864, but Brown includes it in 1862. Many of the people in the Yorkville section are well-known; those further west, lesser so. But, at least, they are there.

I am looking forward to discovering more gems from Brown's Toronto Directory. Already it has told me more than I knew before.