ABSTRACT
Everyday more data become available from electronic measuring devices, and the cost and barriers to use of such devices continue to decrease. This chapter presents manual, semiautomated, and fully automated methods for getting data into electronic format. The methods covered include key entry, computer recognition, and direct electronic capture. It discusses common applications, advantages, and disadvantages of each, as are special considerations for structured, semistructured, and unstructured data. The chapter aids the reader to choose and apply data entry methods and to prospectively identify potential sources of error and appropriate prevention or mitigation strategies. Speech recognition is the parsing and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also called automatic speech recognition, computer speech recognition, or speech-to-text processing when done by computers. Keyboard-based data entry is a process in which a human called a data entry operator reads data from paper or other image and types the data into a computer.
