BLN600: A parallel corpus of machine/human transcribed nineteenth century newspaper texts

We present a publicly available corpus of nineteenth-century newspaper text focused on crime in London, derived from the Gale British Library Newspapers corpus parts 1 and 2. The corpus comprises 600 newspaper excerpts and for each excerpt contains the original source image, the machine transcription of that image as found in the BLN and a gold standard manual transcription that we have created. We envisage the corpus will be helpful for the training and development of OCR and post-OCR correction methodologies for historical newspaper machine transcription-for which there is currently a dearth of publicly available resources. In this paper, we discuss the rationale behind gathering such a corpus, the methodology used to select, process, and align the data, and the corpus' potential utility for historians and digital humanities researchers-particularly within the realms of neural machine translation-based post-OCR correction approaches, and other natural language processing tasks that are critically affected by erroneous OCR.