DAmb Good Idea!

You know those digitized 'captchas' - nonsense graphics letters- that are used to foil spammers in user logins?

The guy who invented it wants to use them to have us put millions of old books on-line. Sorta like the SETI distributed project for we "Army of Davids' on the net.

Check it out

 

Very interesting and kinda cool (in a nerdy pettyfoggery type of way) but I'm confused slightly on how these new captcha's get captured and then sorted to the appropriate books.

 

I'm thinking the 'Army of Davids' would be 'proofers', not prime transcribers.

Obviously they would have to be scanned for the graphics and run through an OCR process and given a 'db key' code.

Then, perhaps, submitted to multiple sites and the plurality of entries would be the 'proof'. This is much like Lexis used to transcribe printed legal text back in the seventies.. they would send copies to the far east and have non-english speakers keyboard them. It required two or more agreements for the text to pass.

For 'captcha' purposes, disagreements with the OCR'd text would simply result in a different display.. and that happens now. I've had to enter different codes several times when I was sure I'd gotten it right.