Pet project

No real news today. The snow makes things a bit hard. Canes slip on ice just like feet do, so Linda has to be careful when we are out. But she's been fine.

I was talking to Jen, about one of my favorite pet projects--no, not Free Software this time--and she said I should mention it on the blog. She said lots of my friends, like you Becky, would be interested in it.

Many of you may know about Project Gutenberg. They take books that are out of copyright, scan them, and convert them to usable text. You can get pretty much any old classic you think of from Project Gutenberg; Shakespeare, Austin, whatever. I like to think of it as a huge repository of free knowledge.

But books don't get in there by themselves. It takes a lot of volunteers to make it happen. Sure, you can scan a book and OCR it (have the computer read the text). But the print on old books varies, and computers are only so accurate. So it takes real live people to proofread the results. Real live people just like you.

Distributed Proofreaders is a web site made solely to bring people together for the task of proofreading. It is one of those stunningly well-done web sites on the internet, and I don't say that lightly. It is one of the finest uses of web technology I have ever come across.

Anyone can make an account for themselves there and volunteer. You pick out one of the texts available for proofing and the system shows you both an image of a scanned page and next to it the OCR text. You check the text against the image and fix any mistakes, then submit it back to the project. You can do one page or 20, as many as you like. The system keeps track of how much you've done. Every page gets proofed a second time by an experienced proofer to catch things you may have missed (so you shouldn't stress about it).

Here are my statistics if you are interested.

You, Becky, can do this too. Just go make an account and get started. The same goes for the rest of you.