Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

If you are like me, then you are constantly reading academic documents on the computer, and many of these were scanned in. This makes it difficult to annotate, copy text for a quotation, or otherwise manipulate the document in the ways that support scholarship. Enter Optical Character Recognition. This is a general class of technologies that can look at images with words in them, figure out where the words are, and then convert them into a format that you can edit. My current tool of choice for converting papers from images to text is Adobe Acrobat, though there are many alternatives. The documents that I typically convert are already in PDF format, and so it is incredibly convenient to run the OCR feature within Acrobat and then annotate the paper using Acrobat, Preview, or Skim.