How to become a better researcher

There is a book I'd like to suggest called "The Lifetime Learner's Guide to Reading and Learning" by Gary Hoover, a Texan who bought an old 32 room clinic and filled it with books--each room it's own topic.

I don't know if he is still around--last I saw him he was on C-SPAN, talking about how most of what he has are older books not likely to have ever been scanned.

If Elon hasn't put any money towards it, Mr. Hoover may need a heir of sorts--a curator to spend a lifetime of scanning his finds before the inevitable tornado/hurricane/purge destroys them.

Different takes on research and learning
 
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I would add treat OCR scanned documents with caution. A certain forum had a long discussion regarding a ship’s armour, and it had been running for some time before someone queried the value; the figure in question was 12.172 inches. A foot of armour specified to a thousandth of an inch?
In the 40s and 50s the typists often used a full stop to indicate a fraction: 12.1/2” which was miss-read by the OCR software.

SRJ
 
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I have worked on two books whose production I hoped could be eased by use of OCR. One had to be gone though with search and replace (Bf lOg, Fw lgO etc etc) so many times I might as well have retyped the manuscript and the second (manuscript produced on late 1980s dot-matrix printout on IZAL that had faded away) I did retype the whole thing.

I won't be doing this type of work again.

Chris
 
OCR has it's place provided you are aware of it's limitations. Useful for cut-and-paste into Google translate, for example, and also to enable a reasonably quick search of documents if the images are converted to searchable pdf . However it is no substitute for retyping as doing that at least ensures that you have actually read the document thoroughly.
 


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