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Humanities scholars increasingly rely on digital archives for their research instead of time-consuming visits to physical archives. This shift in research method has the hidden cost of working with digitally processed historical documents: how much trust can a scholar place in noisy representations of source texts? In a series of interviews with historians about their use of digital archives, we found that scholars are aware that optical character recognition (OCR) errors may bias their results. They were, however, unable to quantify this bias or to indicate what information they would need to estimate it. This, however, would be important to assess whether the results are publishable. Based on the interviews and a literature study, we provide a classification of scholarly research tasks that gives account of their susceptibility to specific OCR-induced biases and the data required for uncertainty estimations. We …