Ghostwriting: eXplainable Automatic Text Recognition (ATR) for Scottish Spiritualist Newspapers

When researchers use ATR to study a newspaper about communicating with the dead, the question of what can be 'perceived and trusted' becomes delightfully recursive. This talk benchmarks ten ATR models against The Spiritualist Newspaper (1869–1882) through the lens of eXplainable AI — developing a practical transparency standard that helps users understand how and why their transcription tool reaches its results.