Did you know that whenever you fill in one of these tests, you’re helping digitize a book?
There was a great Nova ScienceNow segment on Luis von Ahn, a young computer prodigy who has invented some pretty cool stuff. See the image above? I just knew it before as the authentification system for buying a movie, a book, or any number of things online. Turns out this system, Recaptcha, in addition to being an anti-spam tool (bots trolling online can’t decipher the distorted words in the images) is also a text digitization aide. As researches and programs scan books online, many of the words aren’t recognized by a computer’s OCR, and so come out confusing the computer. Think of an old manuscript that is being scanned where all the characters that look like “f’s” are really “s’s,” or strange Old English words, or just poetic license with spelling, and so-on. As you type in words to verify that you’re a user, you’re also helping Recaptcha identify words and digitize books and other texts. Nova claims that more than 20 years of archived New York Times has been digitized with the help of Recaptcha in less than a few months.
Luis von Ahn has devoted his career to creative solutions like this that harness the work-power and work-time of millions of users, worldwide. Click here to find out more!
5 months ago