On 08/19/2013 02:52 AM, L. Shyamal wrote: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Access_To_Knowledge/Events/Bangal… OCR-ing - documented scanners Internet is 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

wrote:

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. http://www.pgdp.net/c/ 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&gt; wrote: -- Warm regards, Ashwin Baindur ------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

I second Tejaswini. Those who are working on Kannada OCR development also say the same.**** ** ** Regards,**** Pavanaja**** ** ** ** ** *From:* wikimediaindia-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: wikimediaindia-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] *On Behalf Of *Tejaswini Niranjana *Sent:* 21 August 2013 11:24 *To:* Wikimedia India Community list *Subject:* Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Indic print material digitization workshop query**** ** ** Colleagues working in Bangla say that in their experience it is faster, cheaper, and less error-prone to create digital texts by typing them in. Once there is a larger body of digitised texts, and OCR technology for Indian languages also improves, OCR could become the preferred option. ** ** ** ** Tejaswini**** ** ** On 19 August 2013 22:38, Aarti K. Dwivedi &lt;ellydwivedi2093(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:**** Hi Everyone,**** ** ** In my opinion, it is always better to OCR the documents. I agree that it's error prone but there is a**** Google Summer of Code project being done by AnkurIndia whose aim is to improve the quality of OCRs**** for Indian scripts. https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2013/knoxxs/5001** ** ** ** So, maybe not immediately but in short time, OCR is worth it. I am not aware if any Wikisource in Indian**** languages is as vast as French, English or Italian Wikisource. But we should have it because we have quite**** a lot of text.**** ** ** Thank You,**** Aarti**** ** ** On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 10:28 PM, Ashwin Baindur < ashwin.baindur(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:**** 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.**** ** ** http://www.pgdp.net/c/**** ** ** 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&gt; wrote:**** On 08/19/2013 02:52 AM, L. Shyamal wrote: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Access_To_Knowledge/Events/Bangal… OCR-ing - documented scanners Internet is 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**** ** ** _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l**** **** ** ** -- Warm regards, Ashwin Baindur ------------------------------------------------------ **** _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l**** **** ** ** -- **** Aarti K. Dwivedi**** ** ** _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l**** **** ** ** -- **** Tejaswini Niranjana, PhD Lead Researcher - Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) Senior Fellow - Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) Visiting Professor - Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)**** Advisor, Access to Knowledge Programme, Centre for Internet and Society Visiting Faculty - Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science (CCS-IISc) t: 91-80-41202302 http://heira.in www.cscs.res.in**** _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

Re-posting a now outdated query from meta

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

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

a bit wanting for Indic languages (fonts). best wishes Shyamal en:User:Shyamal