WengOnline

I was just writing about CAPTCHAs and Turing numbers the other day and I found the news on Webware. Their site is on reCAPTCHA.

According to their site, 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.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, 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.

How true! I tried OCR on a few old books I had wanted to digitize and I was left with a mumbo jumbo of convoluted words. This new way of technology does seem to make something mundane more worthwhile and far less annoying. I’ll try it in a few of my projects soon, but it does require an active connection to the net so it can’t run off-line or in just a LAN environment.

Well I guess you’d have to be online to be part of a collaborative work environment.