Digitizing Books One Word at a Time
Get the whole article here: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
In a small way we are helping Carnegie Mellon University to digitize the Book of Mormon, the Bible and other great books from the Internet Archive. How? We have decided to use reCAPTCHA technology on our new website very soon. Thats all it takes. You should look into it yourself.
What is it? reCAPTCHA is a play on a word for password security methods, called CAPTCHA.
A ‘CAPTCHA’ is a program that gives humans a test they can pass but computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t:
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, Carnegie-Mellon are digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR).
The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher.
More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
Those here who get the memos and over there at MWOS(dot)ORG couldn’t help noticing this exceprt from the website:
“About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day, each in roughly ten seconds of human time. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books. ”
We like aggregation. Aggregation works. It has a very ancient and wonderful power. The Mormon Widows and Orphans Society is all about aggregation a mere $10 now and then. Now if we can just find 60 million members! OK, you don’t know what we mean because you haven’t read the MWOS Charter. Oh well! http://www.ourbenefitcenter.com/mwos/
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