Explanation:

According to the Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900) Official Study Guide and the Microsoft Learn module "Explore computer vision in Microsoft Azure," Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a computer vision capability that detects and extracts printed or handwritten text from images or scanned documents and converts it into machine-readable digital text.
In this scenario, a historian wants to digitize newspaper articles - which means converting physical or scanned images of printed text into digital text for easier searching, archiving, and analysis. This is exactly the function of OCR. By using OCR, the historian can take photos or scans of old newspapers and extract the words into editable digital documents, preserving valuable historical information.
OCR is a key feature of the Azure Computer Vision service, which provides capabilities such as:
* Extracting text from images or PDFs.
* Reading both printed and handwritten text in multiple languages.
* Converting physical documents into searchable digital files.
Let's examine the incorrect options:
* Facial analysis: Detects facial features, age, gender, and emotions - unrelated to text extraction.
* Image classification: Identifies what an image contains (e.g., "dog," "car," or "building") but doesn't extract text.
* Object detection: Identifies and locates objects within an image using bounding boxes, not suitable for text recognition.
Therefore, to digitize newspaper articles and convert printed words into editable digital text, the correct technology to use is Optical Character Recognition (OCR), provided by the Azure Computer Vision API.
# Final answer: optical character recognition (OCR)