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reCAPTCHA Hard At Work, Rescuing Fading Texts

Posted by timothy on from the strange-confluence dept.

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.)

3 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. AC for the plain old CAPTCHA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    When is Slashdot going to this

  2. Damn RSS Feeds by negRo_slim · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I had to do a double take, 0 comments!? its like wtf I just read this a few hours ago... ... at Ars Technica as it turns out... Go slashdot! Go!

    --
    On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
  3. Don't go into the bathroom! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    The last guy forgot to flush! Now the toilet is full of ubuntu!