What needs to be clarified
Verify OCR against letter images, distinguish recognition and manual correction changes and assess the remaining linguistic features' suitability for the authorship question.
Materials to prepare
- All page images at original resolution and in order
- Recognised text before and after proofreading
- The report, feature table and recognition information
What to compare
Locate each disputed spelling on its page; check letter legibility, hyphenation, punctuation and line boundaries. Compare recurring software errors across pages and mark manual corrections separately. Use verified transcription for linguistic comparison, retaining ambiguities and excluding guesses for unclear characters.
Possible outcome of the analysis
A checked transcription and error-provenance table may show effects on the earlier opinion; some features may be excluded and authorship remain unresolved.
Limits of the conclusions
The same OCR error does not prove common authorship. An illegible character cannot be confidently inferred from context and then treated as a writer-specific feature.