Prove you are human when commenting and help translate old books.
October 31st, 2007
While moving this site to a new hosting provider this evening I added the reCAPTCHA Wordpress plugin to help control comment spam. reCAPTCHA’s tagline “Digitizing Books One Word at a Time” sums it up nicely.
The word images contain two words – one from a scan of old text that couldn’t be identified via OCR, the other is a verification word. If you match the verification word then we both know you are human and
- they use your other word to translate the word that couldn’t be OCR’ed.
- your comment gets added to my post
Nice!
Any idea if the digitised versions of the books will be available on the internet? Its a great idea but I am concerned that its a private enterprise and the resulting digitised text might not be available to the public who helped create them, Unfortunately on dial up so couldn’t investigate in more detail.
It sounds like they are publishing texts via the Internet Archive – see http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html