Whether to OCR or not to OCR is a significant issue! When we OCR a page of text, the resultant is often error-prone, lost formatting, and the correction requires crowd-sourced correction. Many of us know about Project Gutenberg. The site provides plain vanilla etexts. But what most people do not know that one of the very first crowd-sourcing initiatives - "Distributed Proof-readers" provides a huge volunteer community correcting OCR pages of text submitted to Project Gutenberg. In fact, I was a Distributed Proofreader before coming to Wikipedia and that was my first crowd-sourced experience.
http://www.pgdp.net/c/ I've also done digitisation in a government archive for five years. We took a conscious decision to OCR the text and allow the uncorrected layer to exist rather than take the pains to correct it. The material was used so infrequently, it made good sense for the end-user to proof-read himself should he desire to do so. So the real challenge in digitisation is not OCR, or rather, not just OCR but the creation of an error-free proof-read text layer behind the pdf/other formatted archive document. Ashwin Baindur On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 10:12 PM, Sumana Harihareswara < suma...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > On 08/19/2013 02:52 AM, L. Shyamal wrote: > > Re-posting a now outdated query from meta > > > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Access_To_Knowledge/Events/Bangalore/Digitization_workshop_18August2013 > > > > now that the workshop has already been conducted I think those that have > > attended the workshop could comment if this cover Indic language OCR-ing > - > > if it did it would be worthwhile if the OCR software used can be > documented > > on the meta pages or elsewhere such as Wikisource. Most of the more > > experienced editors here will be fairly familiar with the use of scanners > > for creating PDF documents and uploading them to places like the Internet > > Archive but the experience or knowledge of OCRs and their success rates > is > > a bit wanting for Indic languages (fonts). > > > > best wishes > > Shyamal > > en:User:Shyamal > > I looked at the talk page on Meta - thank you, Shyamal! > > For those who do not know: OCR means Optical Character Recognition. > When we want to get archival documents onto the web, it's nice to have > photos of them, but it's even better to OCR them so that people can > clearly read, copy, excerpt, translate, and remix the text. > > Is there a central list of the problems that OCR software (especially > open source OCR software) has with text written in Indic languages? If > so, I could help encourage people to fix those problems, as volunteers, > via a Google Summer of Code/Outreach Program for Women internship, via a > grant-funded project (such as https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG > ), or via some other method. > > People who would like to make Wikisource more easily useful for Indic > languages might want to contribute to the Wikisource vision development > project that's going on right now: > > https://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource_vision_development > > The ProofreadPage extension (part of the Wikisource technology stack) is > being worked on right now in Aarti K. Dwivedi's Google Summer of Code > internship. http://aartindi.blogspot.in/ She might be interested in > knowing about these issues, so I am cc'ing her. > > Also - just because people on this list might be interested! - if you > have an old historical map that you'd like to vectorize to get it onto > OpenStreetMap, try out the new "Map polygon and feature extractor" tool: > https://github.com/NYPL/map-vectorizer > > -- > Sumana Harihareswara > Engineering Community Manager > Wikimedia Foundation > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimediaindia-l mailing list > Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l > -- Warm regards, Ashwin Baindur ------------------------------------------------------
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