Combining optical character recognition (OCR) and machine translation (APIs), like Google Translate and Bing, promises a world where all text is keyword searchable and translated. Command line tools, like simple Bash scripts, offer us solutions to these common problems and can make organizing and editing image files much easier. Access to documents does not equal understanding. Further, while access to documents relies less on geographic proximity, the language a text is written in restores borders.

Managing and organizing thousands of image files is difficult to do using a graphical user interface(GUI). Access to this volume and variety of documents, however, also presents problems. Researchers can access thousands of pages from online digital collections or use their cellphones to capture thousands of pages of archival documents in a single day. But we all live in a world where our digital reach often exceeds our grasp. Many of my fellow historians are sceptical of investing time into learning digital techniques because they do not see the benefit to their research.

This is a lesson about the benefits and challenges of integrating optical character recognition (OCR) and machine translation into humanities research. Editing your Documents with ImageMagick.Other Possibilities with Scripting and ImageMagick.Converting PDFs to TIFFs with ImageMagick.

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