crowdsourced transcription instead of OCR

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mhhelle
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crowdsourced transcription instead of OCR

Post by mhhelle »

Saw an article in the New York Times pointing to the Smithsonian Transcription Center last week:

https://transcription.si.edu/

I got an account and transcribed a few pages myself. It is a really slick system. It was also surprising to me how difficult it is to read these old long-hand pages now that I almost never write in cursive and read it even less.

I know there are lots of old books out there that others (including me) would like to scan and convert to text and this gives a nice interface and workflow for doing so. I'm going to send them an email and see if they can share any details or if they have thought about opening up the source code. It looks to me like it is written in Drupal. I think it would be really awesome if there was a generic site where you could contribute books to be transcribed to a system like this and get results back from volunteers. I've done a little bit with Amazon Mechanical Turk transcribing certain information from scanned pages but that gets relatively expensive depending on how much and the type of content to transcribe.
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rob
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Re: crowdsourced transcription instead of OCR

Post by rob »

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mhhelle
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Re: crowdsourced transcription instead of OCR

Post by mhhelle »

Oh duh I guess I could have actually done a google search before posting. Thanks for letting me know! I looked at their website and FAQ but it was unclear to me-- can you contribute a handwritten text? The Smithsonian site is primarily handwritten texts.
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daniel_reetz
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Re: crowdsourced transcription instead of OCR

Post by daniel_reetz »

I think Wikipedia has a similar tool, I have seen a few such sites but few as nice as the SI effort. Thanks for bringing it here!
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rob
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Re: crowdsourced transcription instead of OCR

Post by rob »

Ah, actually I think PGDP limits itself to printed texts.
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scann
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Re: crowdsourced transcription instead of OCR

Post by scann »

Here you can find a really comprehensive list of projects that are using crowdsourced transcription:
http://melissaterras.blogspot.com.ar/20 ... erial.html

But I think that is not a question of "transcription instead of OCR". Normally all these projects use OCR as the first layer and then do crowdsourced transcription in order to (1) correct the text and then (2) validate the final text.
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