reCAPTCHA Hard At Work, Rescuing Fading Texts

sciencehabit writes "Computer scientists have developed a program, called reCAPTCHA, which is being used in lieu of CAPTCHA by several sites, to help digitize old books and newspapers. The reCAPTCHA takes entries from old and faded texts that optical scanners and digital-text readers have trouble with. So every time you solve that string of crooked letters, you may actually be helping historians digitally reconstruct a page from the 1908 New York Times." The Science Now story links to the longer and more informative article at Ars Technica. (We last mentioned this program last year — and now it's good to get some sense of how well it's working.)

Comments

DMCA Violation

[Nymz]

The feature known as FADING was designed to protect copyright works from being pirated by becoming illegible before the work could fall into the public domain.

Prior art

[armanox]

I think that erosion on stone tablets predates fading by quite a bit....

Re:Not new

[grahamd0]

Facebook uses reCAPTCHA. I guess you can make something useful out of the millions of useless teenagers wasting their time on Facebook.

That's not fair.

Plenty of useless adults waste their time on Facebook.

Re:Cool possible uses

[burgundysizzle]

Or perhaps SLASHDOT-READER:

OVERWEIGHT

GEEK

SPENDS-TO-MUCH-TIME-USING-COMPUTERS

ALL-OF-THE-ABOVE

I fit into the category ALL-OF-THE-ABOVE. The only generalisation that is missing about slashdotters is the one about girlfriends.

Re:AC for the plain old CAPTCHA

[grahamd0]

Let me introduce you to my friend, the question mark.

Re:One Problem

[RedWizzard]

One FUNDAMENTAL problem with this

... is that you didn't RTFA.

Re:Image Captchas

[Martz]

Just use an alt tag.