The Missing 11th of the Month
The Missing 11th of the Month
An investigation into why the '11th of the month' appears less frequently in historical texts, a phenomenon highlighted by an xkcd comic. The author discovers that the discrepancy is largely due to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) errors, where '11th' is often misread as 'llth', 'IIth', or 'nth', particularly influenced by the design of fonts following the invention of the typewriter.
Note
not the conclusion i was hoping for and yet, not surprised that it all comes down to making the data cleaner and there is still a story to tell about transcribing every book, what it took and where it all ended up leading to.
a sad story if you ask me.
Published
2015
Summary
An investigation into why the '11th of the month' appears less frequently in historical texts, a phenomenon highlighted by an xkcd comic. The author discovers that the discrepancy is largely due to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) errors, where '11th' is often misread as 'llth', 'IIth', or 'nth', particularly influenced by the design of fonts following the invention of the typewriter.
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