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.
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 <
sumanah(a)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Re-posting a now outdated query from meta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/Bangal…
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
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--
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
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