Wai-te-ata Press is custodian of the only collection of classical Chinese metal types in New Zealand. Imported from Hong Kong, these types were used to print the NZ Chinese Growers Monthly Journal from 1952-1972. Auckland Libraries in collaboration with the Chinese Heritage Poll Tax Trust digitised these newspapers which now form the basis of an innovative digital humanities research project at Victoria University of Wellington. By investigating new generation approaches to Chinese OCR through image segmentation and type edit distance, we are developing a blended, at-scale platform and workflow that links our language expert back to the physical types she is cleaning, classifying, and re-housing while providing an experimental locus for addressing fundamental issues of OCR quality. In the process, this moves our engineering students forward into the very real challenges of machine learning, neural nets and machine translation, all in a language they do not or need not understand.
