Treating“Masses” of Prosopographical Data by Scanning Directories - Hopes and Disorientation: This note aims to provide an update on the progress made in optical character recognition (OCR) and the contribution of these techniques to the creation of prosopographical data bases in social sciences. With the example of a European investigation of European business associations, it highlights the progress made possible by OCR with the analysis of several biographical directories identifying groups of business interests. Based on this example, it is hypothesized that the development of digital technologies allow the creation of corpuses of data much larger than in the past in the framework of quantitative inquiries conducted by smaller teams. However, this article also highlights the fact that this extension of corpuses – made possible by scanning – raises new problems of method, starting with the increased time devoted to the standardization of digital data.
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