🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the systemic exclusion of community-produced historical documents—such as Black historical newspapers—from current OCR and document understanding evaluations, which predominantly focus on modern, Western, and institutional materials. By introducing a structural inequality lens into OCR assessment, the research employs a PRISMA-guided systematic review of literature and benchmark datasets from 2006 to 2025, complemented by analyses using vision Transformers, multimodal OCR metrics, and archival empirical data. Findings reveal a critical representational gap: existing evaluations rarely include such marginalized documents and overrely on character-level accuracy, failing to capture layout collapse, font misrecognition, and textual hallucination. This oversight perpetuates the “structural invisibility” and representational harm of historically underrepresented communities, exposing deep-seated institutional biases within evaluation frameworks.
📝 Abstract
Optical character recognition (OCR) and document understanding systems increasingly rely on large vision and vision-language models, yet evaluation remains centered on modern, Western, and institutional documents. This emphasis masks system behavior in historical and marginalized archives, where layout, typography, and material degradation shape interpretation. This study examines how OCR and document understanding systems are evaluated, with particular attention to Black historical newspapers. We review OCR and document understanding papers, as well as benchmark datasets, which are published between 2006 and 2025 using the PRISMA framework. We look into how the studies report training data, benchmark design, and evaluation metrics for vision transformer and multimodal OCR systems. During the review, we found that Black newspapers and other community-produced historical documents rarely appear in reported training data or evaluation benchmarks. Most evaluations emphasize character accuracy and task success on modern layouts. They rarely capture structural failures common in historical newspapers, including column collapse, typographic errors, and hallucinated text. To put these findings into perspective, we use previous empirical studies and archival statistics from significant Black press collections to show how evaluation gaps lead to structural invisibility and representational harm. We propose that these gaps occur due to organizational (meso) and institutional (macro) behaviors and structure, shaped by benchmark incentives and data governance decisions.