This is my first post proper so many apologies if this is in the wrong place or has been discussed already...
Has anyone seen a patent Google filed back in 2003 ("Pacing and error monitoring of manual page turning operator") that outlines a scanner with speakers that would play some kind of music or tempo to help the people scanning maintain a rhythm. It also mentions how a poorly-scanned page could be recognized in realtime and generate an audio signal to alert the scanner operator — presumably a bum note...
Not sure if it's ok to post pictures from the patent so I'll just link to the post that I first found...
http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=3077
nick
Google Books & Rhythm
Moderator: peterZ
Re: Google Books & Rhythm
Interesting (and weird) patent. I haven't heard of this before - thanks for posting! I don't know if they ever actually used this.
The opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily represent those of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
Re: Google Books & Rhythm
we've just started implementing our software in a production environment, and the first piece of feedback I got was a request for an audio prompt when the system was ready to take the next shot. we talked for a while about what kind of sound would be unobtrusive but facilitate falling into a rhythm since once the first few pages are shot image preview kind of becomes redundant. the error reporting concept is new, i like it.
Re: Google Books & Rhythm
I think I mentioned it before, but the Internet Archive Scribe machines actually disable preview altogether for that reason. They found it becomes more of a distraction than a help, and that it's more effective to only review the images after shooting all pages.
The opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily represent those of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.