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

Not new

[JazzyMusicMan]

Ticketmaster and other sites have already been doing this for a while. Go to ticketmaster and search for tickets, you'll see two words. One is known and the other is unknown. If you don't believe me, try to guess which one they know and misspell the other one on purpose (or don't, this is for historic posterity =) )

Use to hide your own email addy

[RJFerret]

You can also use reCaptcha for your own email address, and be more willing to provide it "publicly" since they'd have to answer the reCaptcha to get to the mailto... reCaptcha mailhide